All those posts like ::video of employee in a low-prestige job accomplishing a lot of stuff really efficiently from experience:: “you call this unskilled labor?” like, yes, it doesn’t matter how effectively you can execute the role but whether a rando could execute it at all.
“I can do this at 5X speed!”
Okay, that means your employer could replace you with 5 guys off the street, and will if he thinks that’ll cost less (in direct wages and say your ability to leverage your position in labor conflict). So your job security and labor power still ultimately fluctuates with the market and the unemployment rate.
(“Semiskilled” labor is stuff that requires training but any given laborer can be trained for. Basically anyone can be trained to drive trucks, so that’s semiskilled. Even if many people could be trained for it [and thus guild restrictions on intake are critical to maintaining labor power] not everyone in a lineup could be turned into an electrician, so that’s skilled)
Who can be trained to drive trucks, but can’t be trained to be an electrician, though? Unskilled-semiskilled-skilled seems more like a spectrum than a ternary. Probably defined as “% of training on the job/in the classroom” and a modifier for length of training.
Yeah, there’s ambiguities. Like nursing, is an LPN semiskilled and an RN skilled? (Do they still have unskilled/intern “candy-stripers”?)
That sort of thing drives me nuts.
You can invent a different euphemism rather than “unskilled labor” if you like; I don’t think it’s necessary but whatever.
But the distinction is *incredibly* important if you want to think through questions of justice and power in our current economic system.
A person can be trained to do my job adequately well in the span of about 3 days; it takes quite a lot longer to become an adequate neurosurgeon.
This means that the supply of the labor I provide is much higher than the supply of neurosurgeons, which drives down the price at which I can sell my labor compared to a neurosurgeon.
This is tremendously important.
Yeah, but what the people saying “there’s no such thing as unskilled labor” are doing is taking a technical term in economics, not checking its actual definition, and then getting mad because it sounds like it means something insulting.
Side-note, it should be easier to get a loan for gaining a certification or something else that takes you from retail/no-collar to blue-collar. And it would be a good idea for trade unions to provide those loans.
There are absolutely people who can be trained to drive trucks but cannot be trained to be electricians. Like, I really really have to emphasize this, because apparently most people live in a class-regulated bubble and are blissfully unaware that stupid people actually exist.
Now, there’s plenty of people who have the mental, emotional, and physical capacity to do better paid, more prestigious, lower-labor supply jobs than the unskilled or semiskilled jobs they currently have! A sweep through a big box store or warehouse staff would definitely pick out some diamonds in the rough! I worked at Walmart and in low paid security jobs alongside some guys with advanced degrees who through bad fortune (one was on the hook for his ex wife’s credit card debt, the other was a refugee) ended up in a situation where despite their training, they had to take an unskilled job. And there’s definitely people who grew up poor, or with very unhelpful parents, and never had access to either financial resources or resources of the imagination, and so never were able to afford training or to even think to seek training out, but if given the encouragement and opportunity, could do more skilled work.
But you’d be left with some people who really cannot be trained to more complex tasks, or who have mental, emotional, or even physical issues that prevent them from doing more skilled work.
A note about physical issues: there’s quadriplegic lawyers out there, perfectly capable of being lawyers because while their bodies have a lot of issues, their minds are very capable and they have a lot of energy and drive to do that type of work. There’s a lot of jobs that can be done just fine by someone with a bad leg or missing fingers. But the less the body is able, the more the mind needs to be able to pick up, generally speaking in terms of work. And tons of people don’t have the chops to pass the bar or do similarly challenging mental work, so their ability to work at all gets chipped away with physical issues.
There’s people who have the mental ability to be surgeons, but don’t have to fine motor control and steady hands for it, so they can’t be surgeons.
Yeah that last bit about hands and motor control resonates bcuz like I am extremely mentally on the ball and that and had the good fine motor control that went with that and was kinda ambiguous what I thought of the idea of surgeons’ or pianists’ “talented fingers”
Then I think from rough devil-may-care use of my hands I had started to see some loss of fingertip sensation and was like hmm
(That was what I first mistook Covid nerve issues for a progression of, flipside in the post-Covid recovery the sensation’s largely back, I thought it was permanent loss from blunt trauma but apparently it devoted enough effort to remapping nerve pathways)
But then neural Covid wiped that and even pretty recovered now there is shit that is still gatekept by motor control. Like I am nowhere near ready to try my banjo again.
fidgeting restlessly in your chair as your eyes keep darting to the big sweet soft marshmallow sitting innocently on the table next to you…
it’s not right in front of you. the chair you’re sitting in is cocked at an angle, to the table, so if you sit primly with your hands clasped in your lap and look straight ahead, like you know you’re supposed to, the plate with the marshmallow on it is just in the corner of your left eye. there is a mirror, along the wall that you’re facing, and you’re sure he’s watching you through it. you lock eyes with yourself, and set your jaw; you are determined to show him how good a girl you can be.
you think how it would feel to bite into it, lips pursing around it; you can see in your mind the way it pinches, squashes, almost kissing you back with its softness, the way your teeth would leave smooth little tracks across its surface, drawing thin little peaks in the negative of the gap between your incisors. you think of the gentle billowy flavor and your mouth wets with saliva.
you sit on your hands.
but it will only be a few minutes, right, before he comes back with another one. it’s not as though you’re choosing not to eat it. you just have to wait, just a few minutes, before you get to feel it soft on your tongue, squishy between your teeth, sweet and mild and sticky, and if you can’t wait a few minutes then what will you be? a silly little girl who can’t be left alone in a room with a marshmallow? (your jaw is slack.) (it would make two bites, and you would open your mouth and gently push the second bite past your teeth, and suck the last touch of sugar off your fingertip as your lips closed around it.)
you’re swaying back and forth in your chair a little, anxiously, shifting your weight from buttock to buttock and thigh to thigh. you realize you’re not looking at your own eyes in the mirror, any more, but at the marshmallow, reflected next to you. eyes front, now. good girl.
you swallow. you see your reflection’s throat working. you’re still sitting on your hands, not because you might reach out and grab it, if you don’t, but because - just because. your eyes dart to the left, again. no, don’t look at it. there’s no clock in the room, you realize. but he has to be back soon, right? you won’t have to wait much longer.
you’re still swaying, first to the right, then to the left, and you realize that every time you sway to the left your eyes flicker, your neck cranes just a little, and you have to snap back upright and take a deep breath and nod, firmly, and look straight forward.
you can still see them both, out of the corner of your eye, the marshmallow in the mirror and the real one, the one so close to you that you could touch it, the one that was already promised to you, it’s yours, you can eat it whenever you want -
you pull your hand back. you hadn’t realized it had slipped out from under your thigh. you cross your arms in front of you. you bounce your leg. your mouth is so wet. your tongue slips out, quickly, dartlingly, and moistens your lips.
he’ll be back soon. you know he’ll be back soon. he has to be back soon, with another one, a real nother one, and then you can have them both and you can be a good girl.
a whine rises in the back of your throat. you bounce up and down in your chair, twice. you want it.
he’ll be back soon. you know he’ll be back soon. he has to be back soon, with another one, a real nother one, and then you can have them both and you can be a good girl.
you’re staring at it, on the table. you look back at the mirror and it’s there, too, and your mouth is open and your eyes are wide. there’s a little trickle of drool, leaking down from the corner of your mouth.
he’ll be back soon.
porn is when there are a lot of descriptions of textures and fidgety body language and wordless noises people make with their mouths and urges flowing from, or expressed within the body as, physical discomfort, happening to a cute girl or maybe boy. and maybe some kind of struggle between id and superego. any genital bullshit is strictly secondary
Do you ever think about how pornography, like science fiction, reflects modern day economic anxieties? Asking bc I just saw one where in order to stay in an Airbnb she had to wear a chastity belt and she didn’t even leave a bad review after
these days the pizza guy is too busy working for three different apps to even fuck you
One of my favorite pornos (for nonsexual reasons) was this one about 4 women working as interns under one dude. They all know that only one intern is getting a full-time job, so they all decide to suck it out of the manager’s dick, which devolves to an orgy. At the end after they wipe the cum off, the girls argue about who’s getting the job, when the manager says “Girls, girls! You were all great, but the company’s shutting down and we’ll all be laid off at the end of the week.”
Alright, finished the weed patrol through all my yards and all the neighbors’ reachable from the sidewalk, then some good smashing on Blueberry Hill but I had to cut it short limited not by smashing muscles but by the calves and ankles trying to balance on a loose slope of debris, so probably still 2 more days on that.
Hey, what do you think of the prospects for big tech this decade? What with all the talk about venture capital drying up and all
Oh I don’t really have a ground-up sense of the business environment at all. My internet tech friends still seem employed but the new arrivals to Portland don’t feel like Seattle overflow yet like Seattle feels like SF overflow, that’s the level I hook in on.
Reporting someone’s white collar crimes to the FBI is like the definitional opposite of vigilante shit, Taylor.
See, the real trick is what if it’s a deposit in the favor bank with white-collar prosecutors, to get “you could turn in evidence of his fraud” on the nation’s jilted exes’ mind, so she’ll be popular with them and no one will dare try to make a name for themselves going after her – her dad was a financial advisor, at least her residence-hopping smells like tax avoidance, I’m sure her fortune’s structured in ways that are at least challengeable.
Okay, more bittercress and other weeding today, all the stuff of interest rn is the very preliminary growth of stuff that’s tiny when mature so you’ve got to look real close.
Think I can make this the last year for it and even all the clovers but one, then tomorrow year will be last for the final clover and crabgrass (and that only so long cause I’m always giving it freshly-turned earth to establish in)
Then more Blueberry Hill smashing, first reaching in to remove the even-pressure-treated-still-rotting fence boards I used to frame it and then turning the loose-ish piles of brush into denser flats of branches and twigs, probably 2 more days of that then I gather up the last of the year’s leaves to pile on.
Then inside, everything’s done in the more peripheral rooms so I’m sorting the kitchen, emptying cabinets and drawers I haven’t addressed since move-in and restocking them in light of what I’ve learned of the room’s rhythms of use
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