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.
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Date Created: June 21, 2023
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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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No one is talking about "suffering" FFS. But a no-skill job is still a no-skill job. Get a marketable skill and there is plenty of money out there.
Paying someone less money than they can afford to live on is allowing them to suffer at your business' expense.
So yes, we are talking about suffering.
And there is no such thing as a 'no-skill job.'
There are plenty of no-skill jobs. If someone off the street can be told what to do in an hour or so then the skill level is 0. If that is the level of work one does, there should be no expectation as to the level of money one deserves. Earn a skill and demand more money, society shouldn't be funding, let alone encouraging, lazy moochers.
Then why do you need to hire someone else to do it? If anyone can do it, why don't you fucking do it? Is it because you're too lazy that you don't want to do it? Is it because you don't want to make so little money doing it?
Maybe look up what the term "Opportunity Costs" means. As a high value employee, one should focus their time on - you guessed it - high value roles instead of wasting your limited time on something that can be done by just anyone off the street. But if you want to continue to not understand, then that's on you.
Sounds like you justifying your own laziness on why you can't do a "no-skill" job. If it is as easy as you claim it to be, you should be able to do it at the same time as your "high-value" work. Otherwise, it's not easy.
Congrats, you did exactly as I said you would in my last response... you continue to not understand and clearly seem to have zero Interest in ever learning.
Good thing we'll get God-Emperor Trump in there and take care of all those "lazy moochers." You left out "welfare queens," by the way.
I can't even imagine the "some people don't deserve to be paid enough to survive" mindset.
Riiiiight... asking for people to stand on their own with marketable skills is apparently a huge ask these days from some. Just come out and say you are lazy and want hand-outs.
People who work minimum wage jobs are lazy now? You're the type of person who demands to speak to the manager when your burger takes longer than 30 seconds to arrive at the drive-through window, aren't you?
People who work in fast food do not make minimum wage
Correct, they make around $1 above minimum—~$8.45 on average—which is around $2 above poverty wage…
Even $15/h isn’t enough to survive in a non-rotting apartment, unless you walk to work, don’t eat any healthy nutritious foods, and give up on any and all hobbies/interests.
$15/hr is $30k/year, and an enormous amount of people live on that. Median income in my state is 31k/year.
Not everywhere is LA.
Good jump in logic there! Your future is bright indeed!1!!
Ah, so now I'm a no-skill worker who doesn't deserve to get paid enough to survive.
Fascinating.
yes, in the future, everyone will be a software developer, and no one will stock shelves, deliver mail, or any of those "no-Skill" jobs that seem to need doing lest our economy collapse
I am entirely pro-handout, and I'm not lazy at all. I'm not even a socialist lol
Giving poor people money, straight up, is the second best thing we could do to grow our economy, in general.
All jobs are skilled jobs.
"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"
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.
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.