The only unskilled labor is done by people that just sit around all day telling other people what to do.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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The focus on skill in the first place was so that they can make it a competition that they can exploit to call people "unskilled" without backlash from the "skilled" workers. If you put effort into your job, you should get paid fairly for it. I can think of a few CEOs that would take a pretty big pay cut if that were the case, though, so we're certainly not going to get it by asking.
White collared folks are the unskilled ones. Blue collar workers are the ones who build the world and make it work. The tone of your question makes me dislike you.
All work is skilled work.
accountants, IT, engineers. there are some skilled positions.
Blue collar (blue coveralls class) is just a derogatory term to describe someone that doesn't wear a white collar (business suit class) to work. But it sorta turned into a badge of honor by the blue collar class over the years, but it's meant to be an insult by the white color class.
It has nothing to do with skilled or non-skilled labor or education, it's supposed to be an insult based on the clothes required to wear to work.
it was a way for the ownership to group the chattel. Some were restrained by blue collars and some by white. It also helped encourage rivalary between them to work out their aggression and reduce what comes to their masters.
It already is considered skilled labor.
It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can't move yourself. It's not that you can't be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to know barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it's not like you couldn't figure it out very quickly.
These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional "unskilled labor" required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.
If you've got a blue collar, you are much more valuable to society than if you have a white one. This is being proven in a very real way lately with how white collar work is literally an easier problem to automate.
Automation is trying to come for us all. And white collar workers are currently the prominent "beneficiaries" largely because so much blue collar work is automated that you don't realize how much they have already been decimated. Metalsmiths, woodworkers, miners, steelworkers, car makers, plus all the service jobs eliminated by disposable consumer goods that used to be expected to last 50 years and now last 7, due in part to automated mass manufacturing.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor.
Eh. There are definitely jobs that you can grab random guys off the street for and they will be okay enough at them to get started right away or will be able to be trained to do them in an afternoon. Think of any time you've done a volunteering project - you don't get any specialized training to do this type of work, but you can go ahead and get started with maybe like a short explanation of how it works. Sure you won't be as good as a pro, but you could get up to speed quite quickly if it was all you were doing. These types of jobs are becoming less and less common as they get automated, but they do still exist. That is what is meant by "unskilled labor." It's not a dig at the people who do these types of jobs, but rather that you don't need specialized training to do them.
Then you should see me when I try to repair something
I am a tradesman
I also have a bachelor of science degree
What I do is most definitely skilled labour
The bullshit, classist crap about what is and is not skilled labour is pathetic
I can promise that when the chips are down, the most useless people are the ones who sneer at those of us with calloused hands
I respect the fuck out of anyone who does jobs I can't or don't want to. The guy who empties septic tanks has my genuine respect and appreciation because if not for him I would have a really shitty job on my hands. Hopefully the humor doesn't undercut the sincerity of my comment.
how is it classist?
People who work with their hands are almost always considered 'lower class.'
A paralegal who earns $50,000 a year is considered to be most prestigious than a plumber who earns three times as much.
It doesn't matter that the plumber has a greater range of knowledge than the paralegal, only that they come home with dirty hands.
What paralegal shit in your cheerios?
Dude, come on, don't be disingenuous, this is well established.
The trades have been denigrated for decades, despite many of them being well-paying, secure jobs that require significant re-training and re-certification on a regular basis.
Well you seem to be acting disingenuous yourself by denigrating other professions you dont respect in turn. How is that fair? They're already paid far less (and probably far less than they're worth) you think it's justifiable to say that they're suddenly tantamount to the "unskilled" labor you feel trades are left under.
You dont elevate yourself by punching down, you just make more room below you.
That implies there is unskilled labour. What jobs require no skills to perform? Except manglement.
Bro there were people back in the day who would just push a heavy millstone around in a circle, a job that was often also done by literal donkeys. It's hard to imagine in a modern economy, where truly unskilled labor is rare, but it exists. We often forget how much is done by machines that was done by laborers in the past or still is in poorer countries.
I've had a few jobs when I was young that required no skill.
And they were?
Newspaper round, washing dishes in a pub and putting seeds in soil in containers at a plant nursery.
I call bull.
It takes skill to do anything. Mopping a floor, washing a window, making a bed, or bagging groceries.
Newspaper round, washing dishes in a pub kitchen and working in a plant nursery putting seeds into soil in their trays.
None of them required any training, anyone could have done those jobs.
Training=/= skill
I washed dishes. You can do a bad job or a good job.
Same with all the others.
I agree with your passion, but I think you're digging too deep into the semantics. Sure, after time, we can expect someone to become more skilled at an "unskilled" position, but that's bending the definition of the term.
This man needs an appendectomy.
This canyon needs a 200m bridge that will be able to hold 4 lanes of traffic.
This floor needs mopped.
98% of people would have no idea where to even start on the first two jobs. THAT is the difference between skilled and unskilled.
But does it require skill to do the job or does skill just make a person better at the job?
A plumber can't be a plumber without years of training and experience. There is no apprentice dishwasher or master dishwasher, just about anyone with two hands and willing to stand in one place for hours can do the job. I washed dishes at a fast food deli for three months for a summer job in highschool. It's thankless hard work but it was mindless work and required no skill, I washed dishes zoned out and on autopilot most of the time. I'm sure there are skilled dishwashers that can was them the fastest or cleanest, but washing dishes doesn't require skill, it requires work ethic, it requires completing the task of washing the dishes. There's no 100 other tasks required to do or learn before becoming a dishwasher.
If any functioning human can walk in and do the job then it's not "skilled" labor. Having a good work ethic doesn't equal skilled labor.
"Skilled" labor is someone that spent years honing their craft and making a complicated "job" look like a simple effortless task because they spent years learning how to do it and perfecting it, hours of prep and planning. That's is "skilled" labor.
"unskilled" directly refers to the amount of training a job requires to do it. Anyone can wash dishes or do a newspaper round without any training. It's not a skill to wash a plate properly.
Anyone can do an unskilled job and be efficient at it in a short space of time.
That's EXACTLY what it means - anyone can do it.
Mopping a floor takes zero skill.
Said by the guy who never mopped a floor
In a crisis, I know that I'm infinitely more capable and useful than someone who shuffles paper and pretends that they add value to society
Digging up a septic system requires no skill.
Moving pabel forms for concrete requires no skill - the GC or foreman will direct how it's done.
Lots and lots of stuff requires no particular skill.
It's more a definition of how much training is required.
It's not about whether or not you require knowledge or abilities to perform the jobs, but whether or not you are expected to already have certain qualifications to even get the job. So unskilled labour just means that it's an entry point - you can learn it on the go.
I do not disagree that these terms are less important in today's world where everything is overly automated and the entry-level has risen. But these terms did have their purpose. And not the wording "unskilled" has changed our society's discriminating look on these jobs, but it's the other way around.
That's probably exclusively American term. I couldn't ever imagine calling a tradesman an "unskilled" labourer. You'll get a quick nosejob that way.
You wouldn't say this of a tradesman. Such people pass tests about meeting code, etc.
Unskilled labor is essentially labor that anyone with 4 limbs can do.
I'd call that unskilled, as someone who's done that kind of work. I've been the labor for a plumber, digging up septic pipes. Doesn't take any skill for that, just a willingness to sweat and get nasty. The plumber however definitely had skills, and I learned a LOT from him.
Yeah you'd probably have a bad day in America too. I think the person asking the question just doesn't know what blue collar or skilled labor means.
Blue collar and skilled aren't mutually exclusive terms.
It's skilled or unskilled (takes advanced training or not)
And blue collar or white collar (manual labor or office/desk work)
E.g., a welder is both skilled and blue collar
E.g #2, a manager is both unskilled and white collar
There is the quality known in German as fingerspitzgefühl (literally “fingertip feeling”): the ability of an experienced worker to gauge the situation they’re dealing with from perception and past experience, in ways that one can’t codify into a ring binder of rules. It comes with experience and is a skill. And this applies to even the most menial labour: anything requiring effort has more and less efficient ways of doing it, as well as hazards.
The fact that fingerspitzgefühl cannot be codified into intellectual property and rented out to interchangeable low-paid day labourers must be burning up the owners, once again robbed of the dream of independence from those who actually do their work. Some argue that that’s what’s driving the vast amount of investment in AI: a push to deskill labour once and for all, eliminating human fingerspitzgefühl and replacing it with reverse centaurs following orders from their VR glasses.
Some but not all already come under the definition of skilled labour. Tradesmen for example.