Being a CEO is a low-skilled job.
In my grad school biological research ethics class the professor said you shouldn’t get authorship on a paper for “just moving test tubes around” and I wanted to strangle this man in front of the class. Motherfucker if the people moving those test tubes don’t show up your precious research doesn’t exist. Are you gonna move the test tubes? No? Then shut the fuck up!
Most professors just want to have dictatorial power over who gets authorship. The priority list is:
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Themselves
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Whoever they like and can vaguely justify as first author.
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Whoever any collaborators firmly say should be on the paper even if they didn’t work on it.
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Anyone else they’re forced to put on it through direct pressure.
Don’t forget
-students/assistants they want to fuck
- students/assistants they are plagiarizing from
Find me a well paid white collar worker who knows how to hang a shelf frame or line up wooden trim. Meanwhile Joe schmo who works construction can spot framing errors in seconds. We got all kinds of jobs. We got all kinds of people. I suck at math but I can rebuild a cabinet if you toss me a hammer and some nails. People are smart in different areas and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to know everything. Shit it’s why I am a leftist. I embrace the plurality of people. The politics followed after that. I can’t do it alone. Sometimes I need to abdicate a little authority because I don’t know how to do a root canal. Oh, here’s a person that does. Called a dentist.
“He’s dumb for working at gamestop” he’s making money, he’s getting fed and housed, maybe he likes games too. Knows all the cheat codes and shit. I swear to God the people that talk big about “intelligence” are some supremely stupid motherfuckers. They might be smart in one area but they aren’t a fucking savant. And that’s okay! But it isn’t a pedestal to stand upon and judge from.
The best part about white collar workers is how easily tradies are able to rip them off. Know a lot a of mechanics that see those types as an easy meal ticket.
“Your interociter is broken. Gotta take the whole engine apart.” Good on them. Capitalism forces us to play a little rough sometimes. Fair game in my book.
My partner has been having a hell of a time trying to find a job lately, and her dad gave her a big speech about how she has no marketable skills despite being pretty consistently employed her whole life up to this point.
They just grab one of their time tested post-hoc justifications for why people deserve no work or shit wages from the bowl and carry on without engaging their one brain cell
Workers are taught to criticize each other across an arbitrary income divide rather than have class solidarity. Disdain for low wage jobs becoming disdain for low wage workers is a function of capitalists who constantly push out arguments about how they are “play” jobs for kids and not real jobs deserving dignity. They push this narrative because they receive criticism for the pay and working conditions at these businesses.
Dividing workers is a well-tested strategy for avoiding blame. Splitting up white collar vs blue collar in the same business is the same thing, and don’t forget professional managers. The professional managers are also workers but they are employed to surveil the workforce, carry out the owner’s interests, and take flak rather than the owner. The white collar workers are built up around propaganda that they are special and better, with compensation to reaffirm this. To enter, you must have qualifications that are mostly a stand-in for socioeconomic status, like an irrelevant college degree. If you have an irrelevant college degree, you operate around the expectation of a white collar job, as you’re told that’s the qualification that makes you good enough to get that money and specialness. If you’re unemployed and are having trouble getting the white collar job, you becomd frustrated, as you thought you were entitled to it.
Anyways I have seen a lot of this attitude among people ascending the academic ladder. They think of themselves as apart from and better than the grocery store worker, or that they’re trying to be. Luckily, it can be broken through with discussions and pushing class consciousness, but it is annoying to deal with.
White collar workers have entry level “administrative” positions and temp-worker positions that pay minimum wage or barely above it. People who do data entry, processing, secretarial duties, call centers, etc. are often considered “low skill” as well and kept in cubicle hell. I know a guy who has a college degree in business and still works in one such position full time for only around 35k per year in a relatively expensive state, that’s not exactly living high on the hog. The class of middle income white collar college graduate is shrinking rapidly and being automated/offshored, a large percentage of “white collar workers” are working class and barely above poverty line living in a shitty apartment.
So the divide between white collar and educated vs. blue collar and uneducated is faker than ever, as it’s not even backed by special compensation for white collars anymore to reaffirm the divide. It’s a purely cultural and gender divide, the nerds/girls and the jocks/immigrants (women overwhelmingly work these low income white collar positions).
Workers in America have developed a very solid consumer identity rather than class identity. That’s by design, I think. It’s why the most denigrated type of work is fast food service. It puts you on the other side of consuming, the one handing out the treats rather than receiving them.
It’s really insidious and a big reason why America needs to go
All work requires a degree of skill and time, people just don’t respect that at all, have to know what you’re doing even at the most deceptively simple ‘unskilled job’ how to hold a shovel so you don’t get hurt or use the OS of a register. It still takes like 6 months for a supposed ‘unskilled laborer’ to become fully efficient at their position, it may not be the years of a skilled tradesman or similar, but thats something to consider that so few do.
Anyway, is just daily/weekly life in retail or anything public when something goes mildly wrong (even if just in their heads) to an asshole customer. ‘This is why I went to college’, sweet summer child, if you only knew, or parents warning their kids to go to college so they don’t end up like me (LOL). This is a system where you can do everything ‘right’, have whatever paper qualifications and still end up in a ‘low-skilled’ job, moreso the more minorities you are. Anyway, more minorities you are and less people believe you, a situation I will always find myself in personally.
Anyway, I don’t feel too bad when I hear the phrase since I shadowed a doctor getting told that quite a bit by boomers as part as an internship I had to do, its more about being a classist supremacist asshole than anything else.
For real, and even if the skills required for a job are easy to obtain and easy to retain, that job is still providing value to the community, like say a garbage collector, not the most complex skills required to do it, yet people are glad their trash get taken out every day and without him and their ‘unskilled’ job, people would be pissed off and their quality of life reduced,
So yeah, everyone should respect those jobs a little more, and be fucking polite to ‘low skilled’ workers when they interact with them
