As someone in the trades, 85% of trade jobs are not any more difficult or require any more skill or amount of knowledge or experience as these other jobs. So I find it pretty messed up when people put these other jobs down as unskilled and use that to justify shit pay and conditions because that means most trade jobs are only slightly better off due to temporary social views.

What do you think the barriers are between the two? Why would anyone pick items off a list for minimum wage when they could make six figures in the trades? Is it simple credentialism and gatekeeping?

Someone just quoted me 60k to renovate by backyard. I have been doing it myself and there is certainly a lot of skill to doing even simple tasks like seeding a lawn effectively

> Why would anyone pick items off a list for minimum wage when they could make six figures in the trades?

Because there aren't enough high-paying jobs, and who gets which job often comes down to luck (in the best case), and favoritism (in the worst case). Sometimes jobs require expensive prerequisites that reflect access to finance rather than just skill or merit

It's obviously more complicated than that—the situation involves the whole pipeline from child to working adult—but not by a whole lot.

So gatekeeping?

Well how many people are actually making 6 figures in the trades? Because the vast majority are not, and most of those who do are working 80 hour weeks in expensive locations where the value is way inflated above the rest of the country.

And residential trades prices are based on how much they think they can get you to pay, not what the work is actually worth. Part of it is because people living in a nicer areas can require extra hand holding and change their mind on things 20 times throughout a project which inflates costs, but a lot of it is just "He drives a really nice car and lives in a neighborhood with property values 4x the average of what we typically serve, so we will quote him 4x as much, and that will help make up for the other jobs for poorer people we do that we only earn tiny margins off of or tried to stiff us on pay and required us to go to court for."

Also, trades are largely boom-bust industries. You make money when the market is hot, but that has got to cover enough for the 5-10 years later when the market is trash. And if a market is hot, customers are bidding against each other for their time. Maybe they already had a $30K project, but then someone else wants the same thing too that they would have to work overtime for, so they quote $40K. But then someone else comes along and also wants it too, but now it is crazy amount of work to get all these things done on time, so they quote $60K. Maybe they don't want or need the work and are hoping you turn them down, but if you agree to pay some outrageous price then they will of course make the time. Just like if someone offered you 3x your normal wage for crazy overtime you would probably take it too, but if someone offered your normal wage for crazy overtime work you would likely decline. That doesn't mean your normal wage is actually worth 3x as much, it just means someone is willing to pay a premium for you at that exact fleeting moment in time.

Also jesus, $60K for backyard renovation? Either they didn't want your work, or you are wanting an ass ton of soil moved in, or wanting multiple years of pre-established trees and plants, or they are pegging you as a sucker. Seeding grass is not any more difficult than picking orders and stuffing boxes, but lawn and garden care industries were one of the scummiest and scammiest industries ive ever worked in.

Re the yard, no dirt moving or mature plants. Just some brush removal and grass and taking down some about 30 ft of chain link. Ended up doing it over several weekends. I think they were just looking for suckers, and most people in the bay area are suckers when it comes to that kinda thing.

The guy down the street from me just paid 250k for two exterior foundation walls on his Craftsman home to be replaced.

I have come to the realization that I can't afford Bay area tradesmen prices after having several jobs quoted by different contractors and ending up doing them myself.

Not looking forward to reroofing my house.

> While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order.

This is also true of my day-to-day work. Granted I pitch myself as a generalist with over twenty years of experience, but my day-to-day work uses a vanishingly-small sliver of that. I'd estimate I could train a teenager to do a substantial portion of the work I do in just a couple of months. Would they offer the same value? No, of course not, but time and money can overcome that for most businesses.

Plus, there is clearly some kind of aptitude that is difficult to teach, and harder still to measure, and even harder still to quantify. I'm not sure I'd call that "skill", though, and I don't necessarily need to make 10x as much as you do because I have that aptitude. In an ideal world, anyway.

> Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not.

I'm assuming you're referring to instacart workers?

Normally I'd agree with you that the skill barrier to entry here is quite low, but an astonishing number of workers apparently can't tell the difference between a russet potato and a yam. Granted, AI can at least help with that problem.

But surely this would also apply to many office jobs that require college degrees. For instance, my bestie has a degree in chemistry and works at a local bank branch. This job, inexplicably, requires a degree. It almost seems like the college degree is just a stand-in for, well, literacy. Surely LLMs stand for the automation of literacy on some base level—but you still need to man the bank branch with humans. So is literacy really the skill, or is it just existing with a body? Many if not most workers are not hired for their bodies, but for their literacy. Hell, if you think about it, the janitor probably has more job security than anyone else in the building from the advances of technology.

> The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.

Why not call these jobs "high supply" or something like that? It gets to the point much easier, and you have less of a chance of being mistaken for saying something semantically completely different.

I'm not saying that the term "unskilled labor", or certainly "skilled labor", is inherently unuseful, but the vast majority of times I've seen it employed I sense incoherence regarding who ought to be paid what for what work, and it rarely does boil down to just "skill". As you point out, supply and demand are much stronger explanatory forces. I'm just saying that some highly-valued skills are just as unimpressive as those supporting sub-minimum-wage work (ie the gig economy), and the allegedly-low supply of workers leaves me scratching my head.

One of my other physical jobs as a teenager (i was a lil rural hustler) was caddying for very rich and occasionally even famous people. Many of these people are hilariously helpless with basic tasks—they can't cook, they can barely button their shirts or tie their shoes, they don't know how their phone works (which was even more baffling back then when phones had about three functions total), they don't know how to talk to their children or socialize with workers (like me), they're terrible drivers, and I even ran into a few I suspect couldn't read (which was jaw-dropping to lil hyperlexic 14-year-old MangoToupe), etc. One of them had a child who could speak better Haitian-accented french and even some patois than she could english because of how much time she spent with her foreign nanny—watching her belt out a filthy swear right next to her blissfully unaware parents had me struggling not to laugh. Serene calm and being quick to laugh at jokes is the ticket to good tips.

of course you would also run into people who grew up poor or middle class before finding financial success, and the cultural and social difference was like night and day—those are the people who would continue to thrive if someone took their wealth.

So—to me, the "skill economy" narrative just kind of fell apart as I grew into an adult. I just don't get why, if it's so obvious to me that "skill" isn't the core driver of many parts of our economy, we retain this language implying that it is (even if I do find my work primarily through my own said skills).

I hear you. A good friend of mine is a cleaner. She has the work ethic of a draft horse and takes pride in being meticulous and going the extra mile in a timely manner.

Happy clients are of utmost importance for her and she cherishes the ones who recognize the extra care she puts into her work.

She also loves cleaning in of itself. Even describes it as therapeutic.

I look up to her in many ways. There’s deep wisdom in what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. Day to day.

I once used the term „unskilled labor“ and she asked what it meant. I explained it. She only gave me this look, no comment.

From then on I understood how ridiculous that term is.

For some reason I can't edit, but there's a couple of typos in there (eg, "many if not most workers" rather than "many if most office workers"); please read it charitably.

Edit: oddly, I can edit this comment.