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Correct, there is a meaningful difference between jobs with more or less time required to reach a high degree of competence, no argument there. The major issue is labeling something as low skill. Working in customer service requires skills around managing angry customers, managing time, following up issues, using complex ordering systems, handling payments and issues with payments, and all sorts of similar stuff. The emotional labour of working in direct customer service is high skill and high difficulty. Just because there is not a university degree in handling those situations doesn't mean it is low skill, it is just not a skill we recognise and pay for.
The issue from my end is why do we ask whether a job is skilled or unskilled when thinking about pay rates? If a job needs to be done then someone should be paid to do it. If we label is as low skill we are justifying paying them less. This is wrong in a bunch ofbeays and ends up hurting lots of people.
I am reminded of the intelligence and genetics debate. People can talk all day about how you would design a study to tease out the difference between two populations in terms of intelligence while controlling for all other factors and how to reduce bias and so on, but the question keeps coming up. Why do we want this answer? What benefit would ranking the races for intelligence have? What societal changes would be informed by this research? In my opinion the question is not a good one, we should instead be looking more at how to support the development of any child to have their innate intelligence come to full growth without interference from things like stress and poverty. Knowing that people from one group or another have a theoretically slightly higher or lower ceiling won't help actually improve outcomes for people, it will just help racists sound legitimate, and in the same way ranking the jobs will just help capitalists pay people less for the same work.
I think the counter argument is, should someone who spent decades training to do a job be paid the same as someone who just walked in off the street?
When you're talking about justifying paying someone less, the people who think that way would be happy to see neurosurgeons paid $2 + tips, but they can't make it stick because someone else would be happy to pay them whatever they ask for if it means they get to live longer.
However, I'm not in favor of the term, "unskilled labor". I don't think it really applies to any job. I prefer "entry level" when you're talking about a job someone can do without any prior training.
Yeah, I think the big issue comes down to the unreasonable extraction of wealth by the owner class. We should have a massive median wage, something up around 2-3 times as much at the low end. People should not be struggling because if in the 70s they were able to afford a home, raise a family, and go on holiday occasionally and our productivity is many times more than that our wages should provide a much higher standard of living. Instead we are working longer hours, have double incomes, and are still sinking into debt. All that productivity has gone into the back pocket of the owner class, not workers.