Unskilled does not mean un needed.

[u/Justthisdudeyaknow]

[u/b3nsn0w → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/ElectronRotoscope → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/ElectronRotoscope → u/[deleted]]

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"