rockSlayerThere is no such thing as "unskilled labor"
Except it’s literally just an economics term referring to positions that can be reasonably learned through on the job training with little or no prior experience.
Stuff like this just muddies and distracts the conversation from the true issue, which is that those jobs deserve a living wage.
Yeah I don’t care if the jobs are literally no skill, that shouldn’t matter when it comes to paying a living wage.
Also, unskilled jobs still end up generating experienced laborers who are worth being compensated for that experience.
The whole point of the term unskilled labor is that it isn’t.
If you’re on an assembly line and you’re putting part A into box B, it takes an afternoon to learn and you’ll be about as fast as someone who’s being doing it for 30 years.
Either part A is in box B or it isn’t. The difference between the worst person and the best person that’s still worth employing is very small, and probably can’t be trained.
You don’t pay extra for someone with experience putting part A into box B.
But they should be paid a living wage.
If that’s all a job entails, I’d feel morally obligated to automate it.
It’s far more complicated, what is the ROI on the multimillion dollar robot to do pick and place, how long before a packaging or dimension change requires reprogramming, or you stop making part B and instead make part C that the robot needs to be adapted for. How much does labor cost.
There’s a quite a few parameters to analyze, but it is frequently cheaper and makes sense not to automate it, and instead pay someone to stand at an assembly line instead.
But then the whole automation thing…. Good for skilled labor (the people building and programming robots and automated assembly lines), not good for unskilled labor. If you’re not qualified or unable to learn another skill, it’s one more job that disappears.