Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Just a quick note, there's no such thing as unskilled labor. All labor requires skill of some sort. You have skills, what you lack is specialization.
These are all skills that can be leveraged to earn a job. Here are a few things that come to mind which you could potentially leverage with your skills:
As somebody who has worked many skilled and unskilled jobs, and would not devalue the worth of a job due to it being “unskilled”, there are absolutely unskilled jobs.
I've worked some very simple jobs before as well, and disagree. The simplest I've ever done is collecting medical waste from hospitals and packaging them to get mailed out from the site. There were still skills involved.
I wouldn’t call any of those menial tasks skills. Like at that point you might as well list breathing and eating.
A skill is something that any random off the street couldn’t get up to speed on in a day or two. They’re something you have to develop and hone over time to become proficient in.
We can respect and value people in unskilled jobs without playing pretend.
I think a much better definition of a skill is "anything you can get better at". Take the other commenter who pulled nails out of boards. Sure a random guy off the street could probably do it, but compared to someone whose been doing it for years theyd be a total schmuck. If you watched that experienced worker you'd see how much faster they are, the efficiency and precision in their motions, their ability to instantly analyze the best way to her each and every nail out. There's a whole genre of online videos of these types of people - experts in seemingly "menial" work and they do numbers because they make people stop and marvel.
That’s awesome if the point of the job is entertainment, but if the work is actually just removing nails from a board, it doesn’t really matter if people stop and gawk, in fact that’d be a detriment as they’d get in the way. And the value difference between the guy removing nails for 20 years and the guy who’s been on the job for an hour is close to nil. As long as the nails come out in a reasonable time, that’s all that matters. And because removing nails from boards is not something that takes any inherent skill, somebody who’s been on the job for an hour will be proficient at the job.
When talking about skilled work vs unskilled work, the definition isn’t “Something you can get better at”, it’s “Something you must get better at to do the job sufficiently”
Sufficiently, proficient - too arbitrary. There's "skill" associated with all work and therefore all work is skilled work. There's value in people being good at virtually every kind of work (excluding vulture capitalism, etc.)
EDIT: Also FWIW, if think there's no difference between the 1 hour vs. 20 year nail puller, my guess is you're never been even REMOTELY close to this kind of work in your life.
You can split hairs all day and night about how anything from pulling nails from a board, to not pooping your pants at work is technically a “skill” according to the strictest dictionary definition, but to put all your pedantry aside for a moment, there is just no way to actually equate unskilled jobs with skilled jobs. They are just two different things, and the heart of it lies with how much skill is required as a floor to do that job.
If I could do your job adequately with no previous experience with a day’s worth of practice, it’s an unskilled job. If you could put 40 hours a week into education, training, and hands on experience in a job and after a full month you’re still not ready to do that job, that’s a skilled job.
EDIT: Is the heart of your issue that fact that you’re a full time board nail remover? Because that would explain where you’re coming from but it wouldn’t make you right. I think the healthiest conclusion to your train of thought is to understand and accept that the skill level of your job is not the be-all-end-all of the societal worth of your job, only the monetary worth, and money isn’t everything. I’ve worked low skill jobs for very little money that were far more meaningful than the highly skilled, well paying jobs I got later in life which contribute less than nothing to society.
Now be a dishwasher. Or the person at Bucky's who just goes around picking up trash.
Oh, or the overnight water park security job I'd work part time during the summer. I was just there as a deterrent to anyone who'd like to sneak in and mess around. My training took 20 minutes. "Every 30 minutes just walk around the park. Listen that these 3 pumps are still running and call me if any stop. Call the cops if anyone else is in the park."
I've had a job where the whole thing was removing dirt and nails from demolished barn boards. Genuinely zero skill involved, just a lot of time spent doing the same thing.
I guess you need eyes and hands? And the ability to show up. Those don't feel much like skills though.
Meh. If you can learn it well enough to do unsupervised within a week, it's unskilled.
Exactly. Like, the folks at my grocery store who basically have all the fruit and veggie codes memorized. Like, yes, it's absolutely a skill and one which I do not have, but it is also one that they fully expect to be able to teach to anyone who works there.
Gotta say, on our end we wouldn't recommend the graphic designer job, it’s soul crushing. Video editing though is pretty fun and if your an artists its not hard to pick up