- cross-posted to:
- iwwunion@lemmy.ml
- unions@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- iwwunion@lemmy.ml
- unions@sh.itjust.works
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Every fucking time:
It’s a distinction between “on-the-job training will suffice” and “no chance without years of prep.”
No shit anything worth paying a human for involves human skills. But some jobs are open to just about anyone who can put up with it, and some jobs kill people when you try to muscle through on sticktoitiveness. A fast food restaurant can bring some rando up-to-speed in a couple weeks. An ER cannot. The distinction is necessary.
Nitpicking the label misses the point:
All labor deserves a living wage.
It doesn’t fucking matter how difficult or complex a job is. If your business wants people’s time - you had better fucking pay them enough to be there next month. Otherwise, you don’t get to be a business.
This is trying to ride a thin line and I don’t think it hits the mark. Sure, there are skills involved in any labor. But “unskilled” is just shorthand for not having particular requirements that are rare enough that labor gets to charge more for them. It’s not a myth that there are jobs where a large enough group of people can do the job and it pulls down the price you can charge for your labor when you are doing the job.
If anything this is an argument for a higher minimum wage, not a union.
Unskilled labour should be replaced by machines and robots.
Since we tax the income of workers we should also tax the economic output of those robots and use that to fund UBI. We shouldn’t give tax breaks to robots.
How would that work in practice? You can say that a whole factory is effectively one single robot, or dozens. Is self checkout a robot, but in this case still employs somrone?
And what’s the difference between a cashier, who operates a checkout line, and a self-checkout attendant, who operates multiple booths at once? The tax law would have to codify that. And any time you codify something like that, you get people designing to optimize for tax law instead of making the best machines possible.
There are supermarkets where you don’t even check out. You bring the scanner with you and leave the store.
What about self service laundry mats? Those exist for ages. Do we need to tax them because they don’t hire people?
I like the idea another user have that you just have normal corporate revenue tax and then if you hire people you get a tax break. But other than that you can’t really tax “robots”
But why male models?
Sometimes machines just fall short. Machines can automate some types of repetitive tasks, true. But others are tasks that are more difficult to truly automate, like busing tables. Most people can bus tables, but it would be tricky for a machine to do so reliably.
Edit: Oh, well, maybe I spoke too soon about busing tables.
Machines and robots remove unskilled labour and provide skilled labour opportunities instead. Back in the days farmer was just a dirty peasant with a shovel and barely any skills. Today farmer is a highly skilled managerial role.
But some people decide to never get any skills, the society doesn’t need such people.
To a point, but again some things are just really hard to mechanize. I don’t see cashier or janitor disappearing anytime soon. Sure, a single person can clean an area much faster now than a hundred years ago using tools, but something fully automated like the Roomba can barely do a half-ass job on a single floor.
Ever been to an Amazon Fresh shop? Zero staff inside. You just walk in, take what you want and walk out.
Ever ordered groceries from Ocado? They’re fully automated until delivery process.
Hard or not - everything is possible.
I have not visited an Amazon Fresh shop, but from what I’ve heard they’re not doing so great. Maybe it’s just a pause in their inevitable takeover, but their already paltry number has been reduced as of late.
Read chapters 15 and 16 of capital on automation.
Why should I read sick delusions?
Lol you have been taught to be scared of shadows.
Its literally just a book on economics, and a lot of it is providing more solid proofs for earlier theories of Smith and Ricardo
The answer to your question is
“So you don’t say ignorant things like “just replace all unskilled labor with automation””
Removed by mod
How would you know you haven’t read it lmao
I can’t believe they pay doctors more than dishwashers, what a nasty capitalist scam
/s
Yeah but in 2024 dishwashers don’t need to be hungry. I think this is the point.
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Surely farming and construction aren’t considered unskilled labor? It looks like the left middle square is at a sewing machine which I also wouldn’t consider unskilled
which is why its a myth, ungrounded in reality
Supply > demand --> price decrease
Unless you control supply, then you can create artificial scarcity.
There’s also the common way where large corporations kill smaller companies or local businesses by predatory pricing techniques, then when those are under, they absorb the business and hike prices.
As manual labour goes, if your market is controlled by a single entity, then even if there’s large demand for you, you won’t have a chance in getting good conditions.
The same goes if you’re a contractor or a small company where your client controls the market.
