At Thanksgiving, we rightly give thanks. And let’s be clear, amid all the commotion consuming daily headlines, we Americans do indeed have a lot to be grateful for. We are still relatively free. We are also incredibly successful – a prosperity that would not be possible without exceptionally talented and driven entrepreneurs and the courageous investors who support them. But this year, I want to give special thanks to the workers we call “unskilled”.
They may not have acquired the know-how or the years of education that the people you see on television have, or the academics, the tech gurus, or the financial market experts. But low-skilled workers are nonetheless among the unsung heroes of our lives.
AOC, so full of nonsense, talks about ‘unskilled’ workers
Before I begin, I want to challenge an increasingly popular mistake. It has become a talking point of the political left to insist that low-skilled workers do not exist. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., for example, tweeted earlier this year that “the suggestion that all work is ‘unskilled’ is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little or no health care and low wages.” Many have since jumped on the bandwagon to make the same point. But that’s completely absurd.
so simply call “low-skilled” workers allowed employers to underpay and overwork them, so every worker in America would be labeled as such and paid a pittance, including professional sports stars and neurosurgeons.
Now, to be fair, a lot of the confusion comes from neglecting the term. We tend to group entry level jobs with jobs that don’t require much education, or with jobs that require specialized skills but no formal education. These are very different types of jobs, and they offer very different prospects to those who do them. The term is also complicated by the fact that some of these workers do not have Again acquired the skills needed to perform more specialized tasks. Many 16-year-olds who mop up spilled milk in supermarkets and mow people’s lawns will learn to weld, program computers or perform brain surgery. In a few years, with more education, they could very well become highly skilled.
While it shouldn’t be controversial to say that some workers have less job skills than others, there are no “unskilled” workers. In fact, many of the jobs we label as “low-skilled” require significant skills, know-how and common sense. Does anyone really believe that there are no special skills and practices in being a nanny, cook, gardener, or carpenter’s helper? Most college grads couldn’t do these jobs, either because we don’t know how (proving that the jobs really require different skills) or because this work is usually terribly difficult.
Identifying workers who currently have the least valuable workplace skill set is not part of a myth-perpetuating ploy; it is simply a way of speaking, albeit imprecisely, of a reality. That some members of Congress are oblivious to this is evidence of unskilled thinking (or, perhaps, high-skilled politics).
Politicians never seem to understand the importance of low-skilled workers
While some on the left insist that it is wrong to assume that some jobs are truly low-skilled, some on the right assume that low-skilled workers are somehow undesirable and deserve to be devalued, especially when those workers come from poor foreign countries. But that too is nonsense.
Close your eyes for a second and imagine what your life would be like if, overnight, all the workers employed in these fields disappeared. It would be a disaster. Indeed, whether we recognize it or not, we all benefit from those workers who bust their asses at work, stock shelves, pick fruits and vegetables, clean homes and hospitals, deliver food, watch children at daycare or at home, etc. After.
These are people who showed up for this country when the economy was shut down by the government, working in jobs labeled “essential”. Your local grocery store was not kept open during this time by the IT class who stayed comfortably at home. The low-skilled workers were the ones who prepared your food, delivered it, and kept the economy going as much as possible. And we are all feeling the pain right now as others have not returned to work, leaving millions of jobs unfilled.
More importantly, many of these workers are part of our families. They care for our children, allow us to work and get promoted, and are an essential part of what makes our lives comfortable. So on this Thanksgiving, we need to forget political and political divides and just give thanks to those workers without whom our lives would be less.
Véronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
