r/CuratedTumblr • u/Justthisdudeyaknow Prolific poster- Not a bot, I swear • 13h ago
Infodumping Unskilled does not mean un needed.
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u/Snoo_72851 13h ago
All I'm saying is, United Healthcare's stock took a hit, but it didn't just collapse.
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u/Clone_JS636 13h ago
And the stock took a hit because it became public that they were denying more than 1 in 3 claims, which made the company look bad. The CEO dying likely didn't directly impact the stock prices that much.
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u/Emergency_Elephant 12h ago
If a job doesn't deserve a living wage and is intended for high schoolers, then the working hours must strictly adhere to a healthy school schedule. That means that grocery stores, restaurants, delivery services, retail stores etc would only be open from 3-7PM weekdays and 9-5 on weekends. Does that not seem sustainable? Well that means there's a problem with your system
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u/jzillacon 3h ago
You need to cut those hours down even further if you want the students to have a reasonable time for their homework.
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u/CapnFatSparrow 1h ago
Homework, extra curricular activities, family time, prepping for college/learning a trade/skill, chores, and a social life. Yeah, so 4pm-5:30pm on weekdays, so they have enough time for opening duties and off by 6pm with closing duties and 12pm-4pm on weekends.
Perfect. I'm sure all those people who shout about minimum wage jobs being for teenagers will be thrilled!
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u/curvingf1re 13h ago
You don't want big things at the top of structures. That's not stable. This is why the pyramids are still around, but some of our most illustrious skyscrapers, the twin tow
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u/YUNoJump 12h ago
This is one of those situations where your opponent's logic is hard to understand because they likely aren't even following a consistent logical framework, it's just gut feelings and prejudice. They don't have a full concept of how their "working class can't afford to live" system would work, they just start at "unskilled labour shouldn't pay much" and think up whatever justifies their position on a whim.
It's very common to see silly, surface-level positions like "McDonalds is a job for teenagers, so it doesn't need to pay a living wage", or "I can make coffee at home, so Starbucks employees are worthless". These positions can be easily dismantled in a dozen different ways, but they're still common, because people aren't thinking logically, they're just self-justifying whatever existing opinion they had of "unskilled" workers.
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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 12h ago
one of the weirder thing i've seen, especially among americans (as a european), is that a lot of them don't want to just have a nice life. they want a nicer life than their neighbor. they don't want to feel good, they want to feel superior, and if anyone can have something, that something is worthless to them. it's definitely not all americans, there are a lot of sane people and a lot of stupid people in every society, but it's an idea that for some reason seems particularly widespread in the us.
over here, we rarely have people complain why "their" taxes are helping people other than them. people don't consider taxation theft (which, if you think about it, is fucking weird, we had a nobility and kings ruling most of us for a century or so when the yanks already had their democracy, if anyone should have that residual cultural effect it's us), we consider it a contribution to make society nice. because we want nice things for ourselves, and if our neighbor gets something nice out of it too, that just makes it better. life is not a competition -- and it seems like the yanks consider it as such, and that's why they're raging at social programs that would use "their hard-earned money" to prop someone else up and make it difficult to gain that much of an advantage compared to them.
when you talk to people who want to have a working class who can't afford to live, and actually listen to what they're saying and just explore the topic instead of telling them why they're wrong, that's usually where the rabbit hole leads. they want to make sure others are not earning too much because if they are, that diminishes their salary in their eyes. if a starbucks barista could earn $100k then earning $100k wouldn't be special, and if whatever they earn is not special, if it doesn't put them above the barista, then it's worthless.
america is a society of haves and have nots and it seems many yanks are afraid that if things got better for the have nots, it would mean they would also become have nots. it seems they have a hard time imagining a society where everyone can have a nice time. why that is is probably way too deep of a topic, but if you wanna convince them that yes, working class people do in fact deserve to live comfortably, you probably also need to convince them that it's not the end of the world if it actually happens, and that their lifestyle is not predicated on everyone else having a bad time. (like for some people, sure, that's a thing, but if you don't have a seven figure salary or above, you could still live like you currently do without everyone getting exploited around you.)
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u/ElectronRotoscope 8h ago edited 55m ago
Lyndon Johnson maintained that part of why it was so hard to fight entrenched racism in America was that poor white people didn't mind as much being looked down on by the rich, as long as they could think of other people as non-white and therefore have someone they could look down on
america is a society of haves and have nots
On that subject, another weird quirk of the American mindset seems to be a resistance to ever accept that one is a has-not. While this is argued to be good for social mobility and resistance to entrenched generational problems, it does create issues for forming solidarity and movements to represent the needs of the lower classes.
From a Marco Rubio speech, saying the quiet part loud: "But to do that, it all starts with embracing the fundamental principle of America’s prosperity. And that is that we have never been a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it. And that’s who we need to remain."
Or Steinbeck about the 1930s: "I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist." often quoted as "socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
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u/Hakar_Kerarmor Swine. Guillotine, now. 9h ago
people don't consider taxation theft
Unfortunately, I'm currently training a new co-worker who does believe they are.
Or at least, that's what he claims, though from talking with him I get the impression he's mostly unhappy about where the taxes go.
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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 3h ago
yeah, everyone is their own person, there's a lot of noise in the data at that level. it averages out when you're talking about our society as a whole, and not just individuals.
i'm also not saying our taxes are universally being put to good use. hell, i'm hungarian, everyone here knows that there's a lot of government corruption. but there's a difference between recognizing that corrupt officials are stealing from tax-funded government programs, vs considering the entire institution of taxation a legal form of theft by the government itself from sovereign citizens. the latter is a very common idea among yanks -- i'm not saying everyone there, or even a majority thinks like that, but a statistically significant amount of people do, and it definitely made its mark on their culture.
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u/donaldhobson 6h ago
>America is a society of haves and have nots and it seems many yanks are afraid that if things got better for the have nots, it would mean they would also become have nots.
Imagine an extreme case, a president decides to make every american a billionaire, and prints the $350 quadrillion dollars needed.
There just isn't the manufacturing capability, nor the pilots, for 350 million private jets.
If the economy is still using US dollars, not gold or bitcoin, then some large groups of friends will pool their money to buy a private jet.
So the price of private jets goes way up. And so people who were already private jet rich find they aren't much richer than anyone else any more.
Making everyone better off is hard. You need to increase production.
> if you don't have a seven figure salary or above, you could still live like you currently do without everyone getting exploited around you.
Suppose the poor people are stuck eating the cheap bread. And the middle class people are eating nice steak. The rich people also eat steak. But they can only eat so much, and there aren't that many rich people anyway.
There is just not enough steak currently being produced for all the poor exploited people to consume it.
So in order to "live like you currently do without everyone getting exploited around you", you need more cows. Is there room for those cows? Maybe. Maybe not.
And it's like that for loads and loads of things, not just steak. Most of the little luxuries that the middle class buy are not things a billionaire would buy 1000x as much of.
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u/sonicboom5058 4h ago
Except most necessities aren't really in scarcity these days. Like private jets sure but food and housing? We have more than enough to go around, it's just being hoarded and wasted to the point that it becomes unaffordable for many people. Minimum wage going up to reflect a livable wage isn't going to suddenly mean that the middle class is going to starve.
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u/donaldhobson 3h ago
> Like private jets sure but food and housing? We have more than enough to go around
Yes and no.
If by food you mean enough calories to live on, then yes.
If your talking about just the USA, basically 0 americans die of starvation.
But you do have Americans buying cheap bread over tastier and healtier options. And there are plenty of people where things seem "unaffordable" because they have to think and worry about money a lot, it costs more than it used to and maybe they are going into debt.
Housing is similar. But there is an extra factor of "we could build houses here, but zoning rules make it illegal".
There are a lot of laws that make it hard to build low quality high quantity housing. Anti-slum laws.
It wouldn't be hard to provide everyone with a house, if a garden shed in the middle of nowhere counts as a house.
> Minimum wage going up to reflect a livable wage isn't going to suddenly mean that the middle class is going to starve.
No. But minimum wage going up (and employers paying that wage, not firing people) is going to cause some amount of general inflation, as everyone raises their prices a bit due to higher staffing costs and their customers having more money.
There isn't some vast pile of food/housing going to waste by being hoarded.
Sure, there are some piles of waste that look big, but it's fairly small on a national scale.
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u/donaldhobson 6h ago
Across most of human history, most people often weren't paid in cash as such. But, converting it to cash, they were paid WAY WAY less than a "living wage".
Empirically people do live on small quantities of money. Not always, some of them die. But a large number of medieval peasants lived long enough to produce the next generation. Sometimes they live in hovels or in cardboard boxes under bridges. Sometimes they eat anything they can find out of bins, or scavenge the leftover crops out of fields once the farmer has done harvesting.
This sort of thing has been going on for most of human history. It's not something a pre-industrial society could afford to fix.
If we do manage to give everyone a living wage, it will be a great achievement of modernity.
Also. Keep in mind economic-value. Economic value is a question of "how much will other people want to pay for this person's work". A baby's work has 0 economic-value. This isn't any moral statement. It simply means that someone else has to pay for the babies living costs.
Some people's labor has an economic value below the "living wage". Ie if society wants that person to live a lifestyle where they are rich enough to not scavenge from bins, then someone else needs to pay for it.
This means taxes. The minimum wage is basically a disguised tax on low paying employers. And not a particularly efficient tax.
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u/sonicboom5058 4h ago
But it's not the middle ages anymore, we have the resources to be able to provide a decent lving to everyone and I'd argue we have a moral imperative to do so. We aren't beholden to capitalism in the way you seem to think.
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u/Frodo_max 13h ago
we need a caste to ridicule to keep people in line
e: and feel better about ourselves.
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u/Satisfaction-Motor 12h ago
IMO the framing of “unskilled labor” and “anyone could pick this up” leads to the pushing out of experienced employees. If “anyone” can pick it up, long-term employees are not valued and are often pushed out so that newer & cheaper people can be hired (I.e. high-turnover models of employment). It’s also an explicit cultural attitude that people shouldn’t stay at these jobs for a long time, which contributes to this.
The person who’s been working fast food for 5 years will be much faster, knowledgeable, and more efficient than someone who’s been working for 1 year. Sure, someone could learn the job in a week— but being good at it takes much longer.
But I’m heavily biased, because when I quit my last job they had to replace me with 6 people ✌🏻 Despite constantly insisting that my job was a “one person job” and insisting that I needed to be faster than I already was. They very quickly figured out that’s not possible after I left.
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u/Outerestine 12h ago
we have exact proof that ceos are unnecessary. Thanks to luigi. UHC just kept going after they lost their CEO. Nothing fell apart. So why do they get paid so much, huh?
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u/sub_surfer 9h ago
I assume they were immediately replaced by someone else, an interim CEO. Also, CEOs are making long term decisions that are not required for day to day operations but do eventually make a big difference
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u/LasAguasGuapas 7h ago
That's the catch that gets me. If they make a big enough difference to warrant the pay they get, we should hold them responsible for the bad stuff as well.
Like okay UHC guy might not be responsible for every single person who died because of denied insurance, but I feel like at the very least he should be responsible in proportion to the amount of money he makes by being the CEO.
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u/donaldhobson 6h ago
For most CEO's, the pay they get is fractions of a percent of the overall companies money.
> but I feel like at the very least he should be responsible in proportion to the amount of money he makes by being the CEO.
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u/LasAguasGuapas 6h ago
Fraction of a percent of thousands of deaths is still a death or two
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u/sonicboom5058 4h ago
To clarify for anyone unsure. Killing people is bad, even if it's only 2 or 3.
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13h ago edited 2h ago
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u/ArmchairJedi 12h ago
"Unskilled labor" is word used in academia. It doesn't mean a laborer doesn't have any skills, it means they don't have specialized training.
Its not 'a myth'. It's not an insult. Its simply a label for a specific group a laborers.
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11h ago edited 2h ago
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u/ArmchairJedi 10h ago
The only people using to mean something other than it does, is people such as yourself who OPENLY know what the language means, but intentionally manipulate it anyways.
The same would just as easily eventually happen with new labels such as "entry level" or "low barrier" labor to. So what's the point?
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10h ago edited 2h ago
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u/ArmchairJedi 2h ago
You outright said you 'understand' what I pointed out....that unskilled labor is a term used in academia and doesn't mean a laborer lacks skill... yet had used it in its (quoting you) "colloquial connotations that departs from the intention of the definition".
That's being intentionally manipulative.... or lying, because you didn't know what it actually meant and are embarrassed for being called out.
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u/donaldhobson 6h ago
"low barrier labor,"
Makes me think of bricklayers going around making short walls.
This is one of those euphemism treadmill things, blind turning into visually impaired and all that.
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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 12h ago
disagreed, "unskilled labor" is a useful qualifier even if you're not using it to deny people a comfortable livelihood. it provides an entry for people into the labor market who might not have been fortunate enough to have a childhood conducive to getting a whole ass degree before their first paycheck. if you're joe random in buttfuck nowhere, you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work as a doctor the next day, but every place has unskilled labor options.
once you have a basic respect for people, the word "unskilled" stops being a pejorative and starts just being a matter of fact. sure, you can't go plan that bridge we need at the edge of town, but you can help in the grocery store. we need that. but we also need skilled workers, and a society that does not incentivize people to acquire skills or recognize them for it is a society that won't be able to make progress.
just maybe that incentive shouldn't be that you get basic fucking respect as a human being by the system. like that's pretty slim to begin with and making it conditional hurts everyone, even those who presently satisfy the condition, but especially those who do not.
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u/PatternrettaP 11h ago
Unskilled labor by technical definition just means that it does not require any additional training or certifications beyond a high school education. It's not necessarily entry level work, or even easy, but it doesn't require supplimentary training or education.
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12h ago edited 2h ago
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u/ElectronRotoscope 12h ago
I dont think "entry level" is an appropriate substitute unfortunately. Entry level, at least in my mind, means your first job in that section of the workforce. You can have entry level positions that still require years of specialized training
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11h ago edited 2h ago
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u/ElectronRotoscope 8h ago
specialized vs unspecialized maybe? It's worth thinking about, and language is important, but I gotta say I do also subscribe to the idea that a lot of the issue isn't the terminology, it's the cultural values that have been assigned to them. There's a reasonable viewpoint of "oh man, they work an 'unskilled' job? They must be busting their back twice as hard as someone with a really specific skill then, hats off to that person" and/or "all labour is valuable, independent of specialization or results" and/or "a person's value is independent of how hard they work or how much value they generate. People are always valuable"
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u/trentshipp 11h ago
People take that label entirely too personally, if your job can be taught in an afternoon with a training video, it's unskilled. Doesn't mean it's not hard, just means it's not complicated. Anyone could be pulled off the street, be handed a sledgehammer, get pointed at a rock, and told to make it into smaller rocks. It just means there's a large pool of people available who can do it. As long as that is true, there's going to be someone willing to do it for less than you.
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u/Raincandy-Angel 11h ago
Yeah, I worked at a CNC bases factory during the summer. My job was stick the part in the machine, pull it out when the machine was done, stick the next part in the machine, deburr parts. Not a difficult job and training took literally an hour and most of that was teaching me how to do all the quality checks. It was about as unskilled as it gets
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10h ago edited 2h ago
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u/trentshipp 7h ago
If you want to call breathing and having thumbs skills then by all means, just don't be surprised when the people trying to pay you don't agree.
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u/oddityoughtabe 4h ago
Why are like half the ls and is pink am I high what the fuck?
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u/neongreenpurple 4h ago
I think it's pixelation* because they're so close together.
*This might not be the actual word, but it's the closest synonym I can come up with right now.
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u/Maximum-Country-149 12h ago
Well, nobody actually holds that position, for one.
I've seen people argue that not every job needs to be a living (and should not be worked like they are), that the concept of a "living wage" is too nebulous to reliably measure, much less legislate upon, and that raising the minimum wage would hurt low-income households more than it would help.
"Unskilled labor doesn't deserve a living wage", though? That's made-up.
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u/donaldhobson 6h ago
Imagine a poor farming village. Many of the strong young and healthy people in the village can grow 3x as much food as they eat (this tale takes place before tractors). Whereas the old man with a bad knee can only grow half as much food as they eat.
Imagine a law saying "whoever has this man work their fields, they must also feed the man". But feeding them would take more food than they produce. So if the old man doesn't own any farmland themselves, no one else will let them work.
UBI not minimum wage.
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u/Pristine_Title6537 Catholic Alcoholic 11h ago
I study Marketing which means I've had to take a few classes in economics since well I am in the business branch of my Uni. You would be surprise by the amount of business students that disagree with the idea of a day of work being enough to well provide the basic needs that are required to survive a day of work
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u/waltzingwithdestiny 10h ago
I wouldn't even call it unskilled labour. There are lots of skills required to do jobs like retail, hospitality, or factory work.
It's not those workers' fault that society devalues the skills needed to do those jobs.
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u/chadthundertalk 6h ago
I worked in a furniture retail warehouse for four years, and while it wasn't hard to learn, there's absolutely skill involved with doing the job well.
There are tricks to dollying heavy objects - ask any mover or warehouse associate who's had to regularly contend with bottom mount and french door fridges, especially if their appliance dolly has been broken for any length of time.
Wrapping stuff for delivery and floor model pick-up is definitely a skill, when you consider it's expected that it'll be done quickly and efficiently. An experienced warehouse team is often the difference between a smooth boxing day and a difficult one. Wrapping stuff up while low on consumables involves a baseline level of technical knowledge, often combined with creativity.
You don't think about it as skilled work until a manager or sales rep with no warehouse experience tries to "help out" during a busy period and then goes about wrapping a floor model in the most unsafe, common sense-deficient way possible.
Also, assembling furniture is very much a skill that you get better at, the more often you do it. Most people just suck at following instructions, if they even bother to read them.
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u/CptKeyes123 6h ago
I've speculated that "unskilled" was a classification in wwii or something, like not something that dictated wages just a "job that doesn't require a degree to do". Like in WWII you could drag someone in off the street, give them a half day course, and by 5 pm you'd have them making tanks.
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u/MaxChaplin 13h ago
I'd rather declare that no one, skilled or otherwise, deserves a living wage, give everyone basic income and make every job a side hustle. Employer-employee relations will feel less tense without the undertones of a parent-child dynamic.
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u/donaldhobson 6h ago
Yes. This will give some really good protection against everything from dangerous workplaces to abusive employers. If the employees don't like it, they can afford to leave.
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u/Public_Front_4304 13h ago
Executives are not skilled and could be easily replaced. It takes more skill to drive a forklift than it does to sit in an office and pretend to give instructions that workers already know to do.
Accountants have real skills too.
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u/dan7ebg 6h ago
Yeah, naah.
The higher up you go the chain - the less actual work a person does and they delegate more. But there IS a lot of knowledge and skill requires to do that. You have to take decisions. You have to manage. You have people to report to. Its a job that comes with immense responsibility.
Let me put it another way - to drive a forklift you have to have a forklift license. To get that you need to be able to read, write and have a driving license. That's it. You have to forklift around regardless of the company's strategy. A certain output is expected of you and no more.
To be an executive - you have to have relevant higher education and a proven track record, unless you built the business from the ground up which is even harder. C-suits have deep knowledge in economics, business development, marketing, sales, people management, law, supply chain if needed. Its also the type of job where the goalpost is constantly moved. The job never ends.
I know people think its sugar and roses at the top, but in most companies these are the people that work the hardest and the ones that put in the most work hours.
I've spent my life in office work and yes - a lot of these people are also very delulu, unrealistic, stubborn, etc. Literally my last boss was unbearable, but I'll be damned if I don't admit that this guy was the first one to clock in and the last one out the door. He went above and beyond for the business. Me? I got to finish my work and go home as soon as 6pm hits.
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u/Public_Front_4304 5h ago
Well no, it takes a lot more than just a piece of paper to safely operate a forklift. You seem biased against workers and biased in favor of owners
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u/dan7ebg 5h ago
It's literally your comment that reeks of bias.
I'm just being fair considering I've had first hand experience. If its so easy and so amazing and profitable, why aren't you a C-suit? Its not that hard, just get insanely good grades from a young age, put yourself through 6 years of MBA, achieve impressive profitability for decades, climb the corporate ladder through putting in minimum 60 hour work weeks and BAM - you'll be the CEO of Blackrock in no time.
I'm telling you, honest to god - I don't even want my current boss' job. No amount of money will make me want to work this much, managing international teams across 3 continents achieving over 10% growth each and every year. Thanks, but no thanks.
And just FYI - I've done hard labour. I've been through the grind. From packing kitty litter, to doing 500 calls a day to now developing business for a multi-billion dollar company. It came with a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of stress, exhaustion, doubt. I lost friends and relationships along the way. So let me tell you first hand - if it was SO easy, how come I'm the only one in my circle who was able to achieve such career growth? And no, I don't come from old money. I was born in a small town to a father who was a miner and a mother who spent half her life unemployed, not by choice.
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u/3ThreeFriesShort 12h ago
Seriously, for real. I've met some really happy garbage collectors and that has to be lower skill than like fast food or retail.
These are jobs that needs to be done, and it is obvious based on the panic of people whenever restaurants struggle to find adequate staff that society WANTS these jobs done, and therefore the people doing them deserve to be paid fairly.
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u/ClubMeSoftly 10h ago
There needs to be a person at the top of the heap to say "hey, we're moving boxes, here's some money"
However, they should not be making the annual wage of the people doing the box moving before lunch time. Make a bit more because they've gotta deal with where the boxes are coming from, where they're going, and also deal with the people who keep moving boxes to the wrong place, sure, I have no problem with that.
When you make so much people celebrate your assassination (and call it an assassination in the first place) that's where the issue lies.
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u/Realistic-Life-3084 8h ago
The problem here is that while the job is needed for unskilled labor, the specific person doing it is often more replaceable than a CEO. A high salary is an incentive for a person with a specific set of skills that were difficult/time consuming to acquire to stay with their company. Since it's not difficult to train new people to work in a warehouse, most companies will not bother to provide a high incentive for you to stay there. That's the definition of unskilled labor.
You can say all you like that that's not how it should be, but business doesn't run on how things "should be" it runs on what works.
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u/chadthundertalk 6h ago
Since it's not difficult to train new people to work in a warehouse, most companies will not bother to provide a high incentive for you to stay there.
See, people think that until a warehouse is staffed entirely by temps or new hires that don't know what the fuck they're doing and make costly mistakes that experienced workers generally don't.
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u/donaldhobson 7h ago
Firstly things probably would collapse without the person on top as well. Just more slowly.
Secondly, this seems to be confusing two concepts.
Economic-value and moral-deservingness.
Economic value is a fact about how much stuff a person produces, compared to other ways of producing the same stuff. If very cheap and effective robots automate all jobs, then the economic value of human labor in general falls to $0.
A person in 3000 BC who plows by hand earned a lot less money (inflation adjusting over such a timespan is hard, fiddly details here) than someone using a tractor in the modern day.
This isn't a fact about people being less deserving in the bronze age. This is mostly a fact about how much money is available.
So. Does the modern world have enough money available to pay all workers at least $15/hour?
For everyone in the world, that's going to be tricky. If you are talking about within a particular first world country like America, yes the money is there. It's a substantial expense, but one that can be paid.
Minimum wage laws can potentially cause unemployment if set too high. They also tend to place large burdens on companies hiring low wage workers, and not on companies hiring high wage workers.
A UBI would make more sense. Pay everyone a bit of money to live on. Abolish the minimum wage. Then when combining wage and UBI, the total should be a living wage.
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u/wordmanpjb 12h ago
No one has ever said “All hands on deck” to ensure the 5-year corporate strategy is prepared by Friday’s quarterly shareholder meeting. But if the shipping department is pushing to get this week’s orders onto the trucks to meet the Christmas rush, well, Bob, drop the spreadsheet, we’re headed to the warehouse.
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11h ago
Unskilled labor is otherwise known as the skill to be able to turn your brain off and do monotonous shit for 8-16 hours a day. Its a hard skill to learn.
I have done both skilled and unskilled work, and for some reason unskilled work is always harder. Sure the skilled labor takes some training, far more than the unskilled labor (by definition) but the unskilled labor doesn't get easier. Not after a certain point at least.
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u/BernoullisQuaver 11h ago
Agree. The lowest entry barrier jobs I've had also were the hardest to keep doing day after day
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u/Select-Bullfrog-5939 Deltarune Propagandist 1h ago
Read that as ultrakilled does not mean unneeded and yeah society does kinda ultrakill you ig
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u/----atom----- 8h ago
What truly even qualifies as unskilled? Warehouse workers, construction workers, longshoremen etc all take unique skills and experience. And even if there was such a thing as unskilled labour, it would still be hard work at the very least. And in what world does hard work not deserve compensation?
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u/TheFoxer1 12h ago
Wage is agreed upon by two parties for a service provided.
Nothing more and nothing less. There is no intrinsic value of anything.
The logic of the message in the post is fundamentally flawed, as it compares what would happen if the Labour of all warehouse workers stopped with what would happen if one CEO of an international corporation would stop.
This is of course wrong, as the world would equally cease to function if the post actually compared Labour in equal measure and compared the situation with all CEOs in general stopping - in which case the world would equally collapse.
However, Labour as such, has value on a market. And as there is no intrinsic value, it is only worth what another agrees to pay for it.
And as it is part of a market, it will generally follow the laws of supply and demand.
So, if there is much supply of people that could provide this service, the price will be generally low - like with warehouse workers.
It takes next to no training or education for someone to work in a warehouse, which means there is much supply of Labour that can be provided by an individual.
Whereas, the work of a CEO of an international corporation demands a person has tremendous experience, education and connections- which means the supply of people able to supply the Labour of auch a CEO is low, and thus, the price will generally be high.
Seriously, this is very basic stuff, taken nearly verbatim straight from Marx‘ Das Kapital.
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u/Infurum 13h ago
I don't care how much cost the academics sunk into their MLM scheme, they would be nothing without the people who broke their backs to build the thrones they sit on
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 12h ago
Hey can we not turn this into anti-intellectualism, thanks
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u/weirdo_nb 12h ago
That is not what this post is about, academics and more manual workers ain't against each other
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u/nishagunazad 12h ago
Because those with college degrees don't look down their noses at those without?
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u/Infurum 12h ago
Artificial hierarchies that enable people born with proper connections to look down on people who actually keep society running?
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u/weirdo_nb 12h ago
That is what the post is about, but that divide isn't "academic and manual laborer"
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u/LightTankTerror blorbo bloggins 12h ago
Tbh unskilled labor is so useless as a term lmao. None of the jobs I’ve seen described as unskilled labor actually require low or zero skills. I’ve interacted with several positions that would be marked as “unskilled labor” and virtually none of them actually struck me as a job that doesn’t require at least some degree of skill.
Anyways yeah CEOs are largely dead weight once a company gets to a certain size. You do probably need an executive office for handling managerial disputes but this is not a position that should be paying more than 10x what the lowest workers make. The CEOs are a lot more useful when companies are smaller or have a much more distributed leadership in a privately owned company. Mostly because they fill in for missing leadership, while in a larger company that’s impractical so usually the people lower in the corporate hierarchy fill in the place of missing leadership until they’re promoted or someone is hired for it.
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u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" 11h ago
"unskilled labor" doesn't mean you don't need any skill at the job. it just means you can be trained to do the job adequately in a negligible amount of time with no prior experience.
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u/ferafish 13h ago
I'm of the opinion that if it is worth having a person do it for ~40 hours a week, it's at least worth a living wage. I don't care if someone decides their pet rock needs babysat, if that want a person doing that all week the person needs to be able to afford to live.