Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."
That makes it unskilled labor.
Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.
There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and experience can make a difference but whether that difference is measured as performance or only affects externalities.
I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company. Notably these often do involve skill that directly contributes to performance but because the job is considered unskilled, it's instead treated as some nebulous a priori form of intelligence and personal aptitude. What's more, beyond a certain point skill is often actively punished (e.g. by raising quotas to take advantage of higher productivity, resulting in more work for the same pay).
You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.
> As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply.
Barista quality isn't much harder to measure than weld quality. "and used" is a cop-out.
You can be doing useful work as part of a welding group in 30 days, but you will not be a master. Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't and all that.
But you won't be a master barista right away either.
And speed matters too.
Also, there are other coffee places than Starbucks. Saying barista is an unskilled job because Starbucks coffee is particularly bad is like saying programmer is an unskilled job because all Squarespace websites are equally bad.
A good weld is a thing of beauty.
Welding is also pretty dangerous. It takes a good welder to do it safely, and do it without ruining very expensive parts.
There's good reason that competent welders get paid a lot of money.
In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.
There's a lot you can learn in many basic service jobs, and become much more effective than if you don't learn it.
But if the standard is "onboarding", then both are quick.
> In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.
I am not a welder, but I've had some welding safety training. It doesn't take a month.
In any job there is a spectrum from bare minimum to a master. This goes for welding and baristas. Is someone who pushes a button on a Nespresso a barista? If I go get a soldering iron am I a welder?
You overlay the normal distribution of all baristas and welders and look at the difficulty in learning various skills. I'm sure they are not exactly equal.
I can be pretty sure welder beats barista, but by how much, how it relates to other jobs, how we set various bars, that's all a lot more difficult.
So in other words, we could have an objective, empirical look at whether welders or baristas actually need "more skill" and which skillset is easier to master for the average person (which is its own rest nest of considerations again) but if we did the necessary (if not impossible) prep work to even get started on that, we'd have to already agree that "unskilled" is a descriptor for jobs that has very little to do with the actual skill requirements and more with attitudes towards those skills or the people doing those jobs.
That part really stood out to me.
While a lot of us can agree that barista is an unskilled job, I heard people call barmen labor a skilled labor. Which is crazy, because it's essentially the same job (mix stuff up and serve in a cup). But it makes sense if "unskilled labor" is a function of an employer not an employee
From what I heard from a former Starbucks barista, the biggest challenge was to not scald the milk during steaming (which is not very difficult, basically just requires holding it at the correct angle to induce a whirlpool effect and keep things moving).
The skilled aspect is dealing with customers efficiently and pleasantly, and all the nuance/craziness that can entail.
Because I have gone to the same Starbucks every day for many years, and see many new hires as the staff turns over. It takes about 3 days to go from "cannot operate the cash register" to "efficiently fulfills customer orders".
Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.
It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.
All you're saying here is that you've failed to see the value in customer service, hospitality, speed, accuracy, politeness, etc that go with a retail coffeeshop job. The coffee is the same in pretty much every Starbucks, but the experience can vary wildly depending on how good the baristas are at everything else besides making coffee. Those skills take years to master.
Just sell me the damn coffee and bugger off with "experience". It doesn't require a "skilled" person to politely serve me a coffee. Just make sure the coffee doesn't taste like shit and I'll come back to you unless you spit at me or offend me. Again - no need to be "skilled" to not do that.
The other side takes "unskilled" to be a derogatory term that means the worker isn't a human being with thoughts and wants and needs, and deserving of a wage.
It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.
This is nearly all jobs.
All unskilled labor jobs.
You're not going to learn welding in 30 days. Nor are you going to learn how to design a bridge. Or program in C++. Or diagnose a patient. Or be a lawyer. Or drive a race car. Etc.
The thing about "unskilled" jobs, everyone seems to look down their noses at, is that they facilite the people doing the lofty jobs of: lawyer, doctor, c++ programmer, etc. Without them getting done for you you couldn't do what you're doing.
Can the brickie work without their "unskilled" laborer? Sure, but good luck getting you house built in a reasonable time.
Neither are jobs like carpenters, roofers, pipelayers, cooks, truck drivers, clerks and many, many others.
There is nothing wrong with honest work - skilled or unskilled.
I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".
I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.
On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.
> Skilled workers have long had historical import...
Value, import(ance); potatoe, potartoe.
Whether someone is getting "underpaid" or a "fair wage" on the other hand is entirely subjective, and you can come to whatever conclusion you want depending on your politics. On one side of the spectrum you could argue any sort of situation where the employer is capturing surplus value from the employee is inherently exploitative[1] and therefore "underpaid" and a "unfair wage". On the other end of the spectrum you argue that supply and demand curves are the ultimate arbiter of what's "fair", and any wage that is determined by the free market can't by "underpaid" or "unfair" by definition.
If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.
Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.
On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.
I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.