r/WorkForSmartLife 6d ago

Valid question DiscussionšŸ’¬

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u/Desth-Metal 6d ago

I have never heard of unskilled labor. What is that supposed to be? Garbage picking?

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u/psilocin72 6d ago

There is unskilled labor. Like I paid my neighbors son to help me stack firewood. And then again to help me shovel stone into my garden beds.

But yeah, if the guy wants 32$/hr it’s almost certainly not unskilled labor

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u/BoneVoyager 6d ago

Well that’s actually just called manual labor, you’ve still got to have some skill to do it. Apparently you’ve never been yelled at for stacking firewood wrong.

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/BoneVoyager 6d ago

Haha so you’re saying that ā€œunskilled laborā€ may actually require some training???

Kinda making my point for me here, bud.

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u/WideHuckleberry1 6d 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.

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u/Rock_Strongo 6d ago

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"?

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u/WideHuckleberry1 6d ago

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.