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“Skilled” is a social construct

Short-order cook at Waffle House. (Photo by Andrew Thomas Lee via Medium.)

My best friend’s dad when I was in high school repaired military aircraft in WWII. He spent the rest of his life reparing cars. His proudest moment from the war was the time he worked on Gen. Eisenhower’s plane. He was a simple man. That did not mean he was not damned good at his job.

“Low skill” is tossed around casually, Annie Lowry writes in The Atlantic, having marveled at a prep cook she recently observed. Policy wonks use “low skill” to describe underappreciated and underpaid workers and a U.S. “skills gap” that needs fixing:

Those are ubiquitous arguments in elite policy conversations. They are also deeply problematic. The issue is in part semantic: The term low-skill as we use it is often derogatory, a socially sanctioned slur Davos types casually lob at millions of American workers, disproportionately Black and Latino, immigrant, and low-income workers. Describing American workers as low-skill also vaults over the discrimination that creates these “low-skill” jobs and pushes certain workers to them. And it positions American workers as being the problem, rather than American labor standards, racism and sexism, and social and educational infrastructure. It is a cancerous little phrase, low-skill. As the pandemic ends and the economy reopens, we need to leave it behind.

The general policy prescription, however, is that we need to leave “low-skill workers” behind. Forget about being essential! These are the millions of Americans without the credentials and chops to succeed in tomorrow’s economy, any number of white papers, panels, and conference colloquiums will tell you. Indeed, the Obama White House, as part of its Upskill Initiative, posited that roughly 20 percent of American workers need to address their on-the-job “deficiencies” to “realize their full potential,” fretting that 36 million people “cannot compare and contrast information or integrate multiple pieces of information,” per one test.

This description, like so many descriptions of “low-skill workers,” is abjectly offensive, both patronizing and demeaning. Imagine going up to a person who’s stocking shelves in a grocery store and telling him that he is low-skill and holding the economy back. Imagine seeing a group of nannies and blasting “Learn to code!” at them as life advice. The low-skill label flattens workers to a single attribute, ignoring the capacities they have and devaluing the work they do. It pathologizes them, portraying low-skill workers as a problem to be fixed, My Fair Lady–style.

What’s worse, Lowry explains, is how loosey-goosey a “low-skill job” is, often lumped together with entry-level jobs.

Low-skill need not mean little education. Another friend emigrated here from Brazil where she was a dentist. Getting certified in the U.S., however, was too much of a hassle. Multiligual, she got by as a Spanish teacher, translator, and dance instructor. When I walked into the tech school here to get my first COVID shot, she recognized me behind my mask before I did her. She was doing intake for patient arrivals.

Lowry continues:

The most gutting problem with these terms is that many “low-skill jobs” held by “low-skill workers” are anything but. Many of these are difficult, physically and emotionally taxing jobs that, in fact, require employees to develop extraordinary skills, if not ones you learn at medical school or MIT. A great deal of skill is necessary to wash a lunch rush’s worth of dishes. A great deal of skill is required to change the clothes of an immobilized senior who might not want to have her clothes changed, or to wrangle a class of toddlers, or to clean up an overgrown yard at breakneck pace, or to handle five tables of drunk guys who want their wings yesterday. The kind of patience and equanimity it takes to be a good care worker? Not a skill, apparently. The kind of fortitude it takes to be a fruit picker? Not a skill either.

Who are we if our policy language demeans those skills and those workers? We are ourselves, I suppose, which is to say that the low-skill label is a social construct that at least in part reflects the structural racism and sexism endemic in our economy. We understand jobs to be low-skill because of the kinds of people who hold those jobs; we see certain skills as valuable because of the kinds of people asked to use those skills; we ignore other skills because of the kinds of people asked to use those skills; and we shunt workers into “low-skill” jobs due to circumstances out of their control.

Neither are jobs or their remuneration reflections of intelligence, although we treat them that way. Donald Trump is a “billionaire” and a moron. A former engineer, I’ve worked with PEs who were useless andf Ph.D.s who were clueless.

“The point,” Lowry wtrites, “is that we scarcely stop to recognize how our biases inform our understanding of what skilled work is and whose work matters.” Woman joining a “man’s” profession lowers its prestige and pay. It is similar with Black workers, studies suggest. “The same dynamics are surely at play in how we distinguish between low-skill, low-pay and high-skill, high-pay work.” It is a kind of caste system.

In Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor,” Jack Ryan asks his Secret Service bodyguard a question.

 “Paul, you think you’re smart?” Jack asked. The question took the Secret Service man aback a little.
 “Yeah, I do. So?”
 “So why do you suppose that anybody else is smarter than you are? They’re not, Paul,” Ryan went on.

They just have different jobs . Jobs that pay better.

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