What an extremely elitist phrase.
This! I hate when people talk about "unskilled labor" because there is no such thing. There definitely is work that requires less training than other jobs, but there is no such thing as unskilled labor.
Flying a plain certainly takes a skill. So does driving a car. Both are skills. They certainly differ in the time required to obtain that skill, but that does not change the fact than an unskilled person can't drive a car through dense urban traffic bringing you safely to your destination, neither can they land a an airplane.
If a job was really unskilled, anybody could do it without any training at all. People usually don't pay for actually unskilled things because they can do it themselves just as good
Besides, driving a car safely is very much a skill. It's life-saving by definition.
If you pick a job that literally anyone else can learn to do in a few days, then the cap on your salary and lack of bargaining power is on you.
The comment above was clearly using it as a pejorative.
The starkest difference that I recognize between people in those jobs and people in my career is that in the former people have a hard time showing up to work on-time or at all and in the latter everyone is pretty tuned in and works hard.
It only hit me late in life that success in life really can be just as simple as showing up.
I guess what I would say here is that the kind of people who feel that they need collective bargaining agreements probably overlaps quite strongly with the group of people that have a hard time showing up.
Apparently the euphemism treadmill is on low-wage labor [1]. Which is dumb, since it literally though not conceptually covers graduate students.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp
There's a meaningful labor liquidity difference between a job that takes 2 years of training and 2 days of training, and it's important for policy decisions. Sorry?
