UnskilledLabour

Quora Answer : Should the UK Government stop using the term "unskilled" for low paid workers?

Feb 19, 2020

Fuck yeah!

The two obviously don't mean the same thing literally.

They don't mean the same thing morally. There are plenty of low paid workers doing jobs that require a huge amount of skill. And if it were skill that made people "worthy" of high payment, they'd be receiving it.

And they don't even mean the same thing economically. Skills and payment don't correlate in many situations.

Nor does "unskilled" in any sense imply "more likely to be made unemployed by new technology". Technology has been deskilling workers since the industrial revolution, and the rise of AI is going to make whole tranches of workers who rely on a head full of knowledge and intuition completely redundant.

The ideal for capitalism is that all workers are "low paid". That's the margin where the owners and investors make their profits.

So no ... "low paid" certainly doesn't imply "unskilled". And trying to make policy around the assumption that it does, is going to lead to failure.

Frankly, the concept of "unskilled" is, itself, so flawed that it would be best not to use it at all.