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Comment by ayngg | Hacker News Reader

The value of unskilled labor is probably much lower than everyone wants to think it is in a global economy. There is no incentive to pay workers in developed countries "fair" wages when that labor can be done at a fraction of the cost in the developing world. Service sector jobs are probably hit by this because while they cant be outsourced, all the other employment going elsewhere just means they have leverage. Some places like Canada even import developing world labor to work these jobs because they cant find local employers for the wages they offer.

Most of the productivity gains have probably come from finance and technology, which would explain why those are some of the most lucrative career options now.

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> Some places like Canada even import developing world labor to work these jobs because they cant find local employers for the wages they offer.

This might be naive of me, but is it equally valid to say that these Canadian employers are only paying such low wages because they have access to cheap migrant labor from poorer countries who are willing to work for less pay than local labor? Without access to their existing low-wage workforce, these employers would have to raise wages until they attracted enough local labor.

I think that is largely the case in some circumstances. Specifically in agriculture, fast food and meat packing the temporary foreign worker program is used to hire people who will work for less than what Canadians consider fair, either purely based on compensation, or a combination of compensation and qualification.

And what can’t be outsourced will be automated whenever it’s cost effective, and our capacity both to outsource and to automate is far greater than it was even just a couple decades ago.

I get tired of hearing the term “unskilled labor” all labor is labor.

“Unskilled labor” is labor that almost anyone can do, therefore it is worth less.

And anyone can do javascript.

Companies wouldn't pay people who can do javascript six figure salaries if anyone could do javascript. Even if anyone could be trained to do javascript, that training still limits who you can hire to do the work today. Unskilled jobs means they require near zero training to do it, so a random person off the streets would deliver value within hours of starting.

Look i see constant arguments from how some guy cant do his start up without h1b labor. Here is what sets the limits : a fucking law. Frankly if it was possible and there would be slaves doind software development the only thing that keeps that from happening is the rule of law.

Why would they hire H1B when they could just go to the nearest McDonalds and poach the cashiers to write javascript? It isn't like the cashiers need a visa to work in USA.

The reason of course is that those cashiers can't write javascript. Meaning, not everyone can write javascript, you have to admit it requires at least a bit of training so it isn't an unskilled job.

Edit: And yes, I agree, company owners are very greedy. They wouldn't pay that much money to get people to write Javascript unless they had to. If they could pay minimum wage and still get code written they would. Hence we must conclude that you can't just take anyone and make them write javascript, since if you could companies would already do that. Hence javascript is not unskilled labor as you suggested before. Every job that pays more than minimum wage is thanks to labor shortage in that sector, if there isn't a labor shortage it means that companies doesn't have to compete for labor so there is no reason to pay more than minimum wage.

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