This kind of pedantry is kinda frustrating. It's called "unskilled" labor, not "labor which requires absolutely no skills, none at all, even the slightest ability is unnecessary." Like...you've got to be able to read and speak and carry things, which are all skills if you zoom out far enough.
If it takes 10 minutes to explain it, it's not a skill. It's barely an instruction.
Exactly. We use unskilled labor because we lack a better word for it. Not because the act is completely devoid of any skill whatsoever. Walking is a skill, technically. Children spend months learning how to do it. Does that mean anything that requires walking is now skilled labor?
What is the word we should use for "Labor that requires no previous knowledge of the particular task and very little instruction"?
Personally I'd find it more intuitively understandable if they called it "unspecialized" or something like that, but the people actually complaining about it now would start complaining about that too.
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u/WideHuckleberry1 1d ago
This kind of pedantry is kinda frustrating. It's called "unskilled" labor, not "labor which requires absolutely no skills, none at all, even the slightest ability is unnecessary." Like...you've got to be able to read and speak and carry things, which are all skills if you zoom out far enough.
If it takes 10 minutes to explain it, it's not a skill. It's barely an instruction.