In my grad school biological research ethics class the professor said you shouldn’t get authorship on a paper for “just moving test tubes around” and I wanted to strangle this man in front of the class. Motherfucker if the people moving those test tubes don’t show up your precious research doesn’t exist. Are you gonna move the test tubes? No? Then shut the fuck up!

My partner has been having a hell of a time trying to find a job lately, and her dad gave her a big speech about how she has no marketable skills despite being pretty consistently employed her whole life up to this point.

They just grab one of their time tested post-hoc justifications for why people deserve no work or shit wages from the bowl and carry on without engaging their one brain cell

Find me a well paid white collar worker who knows how to hang a shelf frame or line up wooden trim. Meanwhile Joe schmo who works construction can spot framing errors in seconds. We got all kinds of jobs. We got all kinds of people. I suck at math but I can rebuild a cabinet if you toss me a hammer and some nails. People are smart in different areas and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to know everything. Shit it’s why I am a leftist. I embrace the plurality of people. The politics followed after that. I can’t do it alone. Sometimes I need to abdicate a little authority because I don’t know how to do a root canal. Oh, here’s a person that does. Called a dentist.

“He’s dumb for working at gamestop” he’s making money, he’s getting fed and housed, maybe he likes games too. Knows all the cheat codes and shit. I swear to God the people that talk big about “intelligence” are some supremely stupid motherfuckers. They might be smart in one area but they aren’t a fucking savant. And that’s okay! But it isn’t a pedestal to stand upon and judge from.

Workers are taught to criticize each other across an arbitrary income divide rather than have class solidarity. Disdain for low wage jobs becoming disdain for low wage workers is a function of capitalists who constantly push out arguments about how they are “play” jobs for kids and not real jobs deserving dignity. They push this narrative because they receive criticism for the pay and working conditions at these businesses.

Dividing workers is a well-tested strategy for avoiding blame. Splitting up white collar vs blue collar in the same business is the same thing, and don’t forget professional managers. The professional managers are also workers but they are employed to surveil the workforce, carry out the owner’s interests, and take flak rather than the owner. The white collar workers are built up around propaganda that they are special and better, with compensation to reaffirm this. To enter, you must have qualifications that are mostly a stand-in for socioeconomic status, like an irrelevant college degree. If you have an irrelevant college degree, you operate around the expectation of a white collar job, as you’re told that’s the qualification that makes you good enough to get that money and specialness. If you’re unemployed and are having trouble getting the white collar job, you becomd frustrated, as you thought you were entitled to it.

Anyways I have seen a lot of this attitude among people ascending the academic ladder. They think of themselves as apart from and better than the grocery store worker, or that they’re trying to be. Luckily, it can be broken through with discussions and pushing class consciousness, but it is annoying to deal with.

All work requires a degree of skill and time, people just don’t respect that at all, have to know what you’re doing even at the most deceptively simple ‘unskilled job’ how to hold a shovel so you don’t get hurt or use the OS of a register. It still takes like 6 months for a supposed ‘unskilled laborer’ to become fully efficient at their position, it may not be the years of a skilled tradesman or similar, but thats something to consider that so few do.

Anyway, is just daily/weekly life in retail or anything public when something goes mildly wrong (even if just in their heads) to an asshole customer. ‘This is why I went to college’, sweet summer child, if you only knew, or parents warning their kids to go to college so they don’t end up like me (LOL). This is a system where you can do everything ‘right’, have whatever paper qualifications and still end up in a ‘low-skilled’ job, moreso the more minorities you are. Anyway, more minorities you are and less people believe you, a situation I will always find myself in personally.

Anyway, I don’t feel too bad when I hear the phrase since I shadowed a doctor getting told that quite a bit by boomers as part as an internship I had to do, its more about being a classist supremacist asshole than anything else.

Debs!!!

Audience Question: What is a tradesman or a skilled worker? Why should there be any distinction between a tradesman and any other worker in a shop?

Eugene Debs: That is not a very easy question to answer. There used to be a great many skilled mechanics who are now common workers. In proportion as machinery is improved the skill of the trade is transferred from the worker to the machine; and the skilled labor of one day becomes the common labor of the next. The locomotive engineer has always regarded himself as a skilled worker, and he has refused to affiliate with what is called the common laborer. Within the next few years the locomotive engineer will probably become a motorman and he will then come off the perch. The work will be so simple that almost any worker can perform it. I have already referred to the coopers. In the town where I live there used to be a number of cooper shops in which there were skilled men; and they had a large and strong Coopers’ Union. All the coopers that worked there belonged to it. And these coopers didn’t have anything to do with common labor. They flocked by themselves upon the theory that they were skilled men and could not afford to put their skill on the same level with the common labor of unskilled workers. During the last few years that trade has undergone a complete change. The skilled coopers have practically disappeared and but a shadow of the old union remains. Now, if you will ask that old cooper, who was a skilled man and belonged to a union that represented skilled labor a few years ago — if you will ask him who the skilled man is, I think he can give you a satisfactory answer to your question. The skill of the trade is being gradually eliminated, and we are taking cognizance of this fact. We Industrial Workers recognize no aristocracy of skill. If any partiality were to be shown, however, I would give the unskilled man the benefit of it, because he needs it most. But there is no such discrimination in the Industrial Workers. The workingman, skilled or unskilled, is a worker; a man; and, whatever his occupation, has all of the wants and aspirations and is entitled to all the rights and opportunities of a human being for self-development. The ma- chine is rapidly reducing workers to a common industrial equality, making the unskilled man the productive equal of the skilled man. The machine is the skilled man, and when he gets through, that question will have answered itself.

source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1905/051123-debs-craftunionism.pdf

EDIT: By the way I see the same thing happening to STEMlords, actively.

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I would generally be considered a “skilled worker,” I work in a lab and actually have to rely on fundamental knowledge I learned getting my degree. When I was in undergrad I worked at one of the big pizza chains.

The pizza job was way harder and whoever’s doing it should be paid more than I am now and more than pretty much anyone I work with.

The work was hard, it was hot, it was stressful, you barely got to sit down unless you were driving, the hours were dogshit, it was genuinely dangerous, and you’d come home smelling like sweat and old pizza. My current job in a 40 hour work week I do at best 25-30 hours of actual work. I get to work in a well air-conditioned building, I get to sit down when I want, I don’t have people micromanaging me every second, I get to wear what I want and except in some rare circumstances I come home pretty clean.

And I don’t have a do-nothing bullshit job or anything, I do actual stuff with chemicals and rodents, not just sit in front of a computer. And I make more than I did when I did a much much harder job.

As if working ‘low skilled jobs’ means they deserve to be derided, or that they are stupid or lazy

I’ve said it elsewhere, but all of the retail jobs I worked prior to my current gig were far more stressful for far less pay

That stress was partially attributable to absolute dipsticks like this

the low-skill job myth is one of the ways Fordist capital formations can blame their workers for being the victims of de-skilling… . by which I mean the process where work skills learned in a production process are intentionally organized to be less transferable to other positions/organizations, increasing employer power over employees.

Elon Musk is peak intelligence.

I loved watching Street Fight’s Undercover Business Tyrants. It was just them doing commentary over undercover bosses and in almost every episode there would be a part where the CEO had no fucking clue and hopelessly fucked up some seemingly easy “low skill” task that they expect their minimum wage workers to do. Because it’s not low skill you assholes!

Someone else pointed out that if a server drops a dish they get yelled at and if an executive blows a million dollar deal it’s a shake of the head.

    Looking down on "unskilled workers"

Libs Chuds

Just for different reasons.

One early reason for my radicalization was my own parents and relatives who talked like this about workers. It threw me so hard as a kid. One side of my family were workers and they were always shunned in a weird way that I at the time could not understand. My red granddad was the smarters, most well read and also hard working person I ever knew.

These people viewed themselves as the elite, the well read and civilized academics and often scolded me for having the “wrong friends”. These were mostly teachers so very much active parts of our nationbuilding/eduacate the plebs projects.

I was friends with people I deemed kind, didn’t care at all what their background is and boy did they stuggle with that. I used to ask these relatives how exactly does the education people have access to define who is ok to play with and who isn’t or who “understands” the world and who doesn’t. And especially how does this exactly define the value of anyone. Never really got a reply from any of them.

Funniest bit is both my parents ended up as uni dropouts and yet to this day they still somehow think they are better, because “educated”. They are not, they are the most “worldview based on liberal tv” reactionaries and nato hawks you could ever find.