this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
The new place for c/[email protected]
This server is no longer working, and we had to move.
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Date Created: June 21, 2023
Library copied from reddit:
The Anti-Work Library 📚
Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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All jobs are skilled jobs.
Post WW2 a lot of stock was put in scientism in industrial nad manufacturing jobs, which has led to the rise of new public management, cementing the dissolution of the bond between identity and job. The basic principle is that everything can be quantified and measured, and that every step carried out by a master craftsman can be exactly described and distributed. The replacement of actual manufacturing with the menial task of carrying out a single, repeatable step hour after hour after hour, day after day. Like a robot.
That's the death of skilled jobs, and it's driving the collapse of the uneducated man, according to Richard Reeves among others. A shift towards cognitive work instead of labor has taken place, and a lot of the jobs that previously carried a large segment of the lower strata has simply moved to asia and lower wage countries.
Even menial tasks required knowledge to accomplish
Fortunately there's still the skilled trades. What can be automated is, but there're still a lot of tasks that require journeyman level tradespeople to be actively involved in the work. Get into a good union apprenticeship when you are young and you can make real money with good benefits and retire with a nice pension in addition to SSI. Unfortunately union membership is at around 10 percent of the US workforce.
"skilled" and "unskilled" labor have actual definitions. Unskilled labor is absolutely a thing
You have to learn something to do the job. It literally doesn't matter what you do, it requires knowledge and effort, that is not no skill.
We know what you mean and in a very literal sense you are right. However, there is both a legal and colloquial definition that basically means "low to very low skill job."
Everything takes training, routine or not, I don't care what a capitalist government organization decides it is. You can't just walk on to a job and start doing it.
This is eerily reminiscent of conservatives getting mad that gays can get married and instead wanting them to have "some other word"
Most jobs are zero skill jobs.
No, everything requires you to know how to do it and put effort into it. Therefore it is not a zero skill job. Unless you get paid to sit and literally do absolutely nothing all day long, it is not zero skill. Less skill, sure, but not zero
Most jobs require life skills which every adult should have acquired during their childhood. Walking is also a skill which you must train, but no one expects a grown up not to know how to walk. Thus these jobs are zero skill.
You can't just walk in to a job and start doing it. It all requires at least a bit of training. Therefore these jobs are not zero skill.
That's completely wrong, but continue to think that.
Regardless of whether the job is classified as a "skilled" job or not (and who's definition of "skilled" you choose to accept or not)... the work and time your employee puts into the labor is as important to your business as any work you may be doing. Without their labor your business is meaningless. That labor deserves, at minimum, the employee's ability to be able to live (food, shelter, medical, transportation, and some degree of entertainment). If, as a business owner, you cannot value your employees time and labor in your business with appropriate compensation to allow them to live, then you do not deserve your business.
This is comically wrong. No, sorry.... a salesperson closing a $1M contract for the purchase of some equipment, and a janitor dumping out some trash is not equivalent. Those jobs are not "as important". Not even remotely in the same league. That's why those two aren't paid the same and why one position can be done by any jamoke off the street with 5 minutes worth of training versus someone who might have a decade of knowledge and training in the industry. Hell if something happened to the janitor for a day or three, work wouldn't stop. Things would still get done. Jim in accounting could dump his trash into the dumpster in back. It would be a mild inconvenience, but it can still be done. It isn't the end of the world if a no-skill job gets pushed back a bit. Not closing a deal that keeps the other employees working, the machines humming and the incoming coming in, is a whole different ball of wax.
Actually, I used to be a janitor, and you're wrong.
Janitors have free access to the building, including to rooms with sensitive equipment and papers, when no one is around, and have the ability to steal shit, perform industrial espionage, destroy equipment, and otherwise completely fuck over their employers if they so choose. That's why you have to have credit checks, background checks and sometimes even security clearances before you can get a lot of janitorial jobs.
Plus if the janitor doesn't do their job and leaves the place a mess, the salesperson can't invite the client in and make that sale. They could go out to a restaurant, but that further drives up costs.
So it's not in actual fact that simple.