this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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There definitely are jobs that are truly unskilled.
These are jobs any able-bodied person can do without any training. Then you have very low skilled jobs such as being part of a moving crew for moving companies. For that one you need to be careful moving heavy and/or fragile objects without breaking them or damaging surroundings. But that’s really more about paying attention to what you’re doing than a skill you would receive training to do.
Right but this argument is due to a conflict between economics jargon and everyday language. The people opposed to the term “unskilled labour” are unhappy about the negative connotations of the word “unskilled.”
I disagree. This is a term which exists simultaneously in economics and in everyday speech. The everyday meaning has negative connotations whereas the economics term does not. People are responding to this conflict by trying to get economists to change their term in order to avoid the negative connotations.
I, personally, don’t agree with this approach to language in any case. Linguistic prescriptivism of this sort is authoritarian and highly susceptible to backlash. It’s vulnerable to the mistaken belief that if someone accedes to an authority’s demands, they now agree with the authority.
Everyday speech in an economic context but not by economists. That’s the difference. Two surgeons discussing an appendectomy over lunch is different from two random people in a bar discussing an appendectomy.
They’re both using a term from a technical context but their understanding of the technical meaning of the term is different and the connotations are different.
The answer here being that unskilled labor is not derived from everyday language, and people who can't conceive of that being the case are angry about it. And, by probability, are more likely to work jobs classified as "unskilled labor". 🤷