Opinion
There is no such thing as ‘unskilled labour’: Drop its use.
Summary
- It’s an outdated term that needs to be retired, especially in the age of AI, which threatens to devalue all sorts of ‘skilled’ work done by humans. Everything of value that human beings do is skilled and AI should make us realize what human effort is worth.
Labour Day in the US was on 2 September, an appropriate moment to consider the term ‘unskilled.’ Economists have used it for as long as I can remember, and at some point, I became numb to it, thinking it was just a neutral classification. But it’s not neutral—it’s both demeaning and misleading.
Often people have incredible skills; they just aren’t skills currently in high demand. Or they have valuable skills that are abundant relative to demand. Or they simply can’t find a good match between their skills and the market because of where and when they live.
No matter how valuable your skills are in the market today, they may or may not be highly valued by the market over the course of your lifetime.
With artificial intelligence (AI) threatening to devalue entire categories of human work, we need to be more purposeful in recognizing a distinction: The market value of a set of skills is not the same as its human value. In other words, a person’s worth is never determined by their potential market wage.
Also read: Economic Survey flags impact of AI on workers, puts onus on pvt sector to create jobs
The challenge for anyone trying to ensure that society has plenty of jobs that pay a reliable living wage is that any training programme for people can also be used to train artificial intelligence.
If you can think of a specific skill and write down the bullet points of knowledge needed to develop it, an AI program can likely do that, too. Not only can AI pass many college-level courses, it can also pass the bar exam.
So, what is left for humans to do?
We must invest in our humanity. At its core, a job has always been about meeting the needs of others. When we were an agrarian society, many jobs centred on meeting the basic need for food.
As our economies and our incomes grew, work could expand to meet other needs: for shelter, clothing, transportation, entertainment and self-expression through many of the goods that we buy.
Today, many new jobs are in education and health services. In fact, despite the frequent talk about reviving American manufacturing, and even with all the recent investments, manufacturing jobs are a small part of the story.
In recent years, less than 1% of overall job growth in the US came from manufacturing. Meanwhile, 9 out of 10 new jobs came from the services sector—nearly half of them in education and health services.
This isn’t a new direction coming out of the covid pandemic. It’s the return of the US labour market to pre-pandemic trends. Job growth was strong from 2015 to the start of the pandemic, and in this century, the US manufacturing sector has shrunk while the service sector has exploded, more than compensating for job losses elsewhere.
The reality is that the US has become a service economy. Americans still have basic needs, but they are oriented less toward stuff and more toward services. In this context, it’s necessary to rethink assumptions about what kinds of jobs matter and, more important, how different kinds of work are valued.
Also read: Will increasing minimum wages ease the employment problem and help the economy?
Many people still don’t recognize caregiving, for example—whether for the very young or very old—as a particularly skilled profession. This is mistaken.
Anyone who has ever had a teacher who changed the course of their life simply by listening knows that some people develop skills that are extremely valuable and hard to acquire.
How do you listen to someone’s needs even when they’re not clearly articulated? How do you help children develop confidence and joy? How do you help people find calm in a chaotic world?
As we enter an era in which the value of ‘hard skills’ may be diminishing due to automation, the value of ‘soft skills’—such as empathy and communication—will rise. The future of work may lie not in competing with machines on tasks they do better, but in embracing the human touch that technology can’t replicate.
To find a role for humans in a world of technology, however, it’s necessary to value all of their work. The market has historically done a terrible job telling us how vital someone’s job is to the functioning of our society. We all recently experienced that during covid. We shouldn’t forget that lesson.
The market might determine the price of labour, but it doesn’t define the dignity or value of that work. As the world moves into a future where technology challenges the definition of ‘skilled work,’ we must remember that our worth is not determined by a pay-cheque, an algorithm or a label.
Also read: Mint Explainer: How workers will benefit from living wages
It is defined by our shared humanity, our ability to contribute in meaningful ways, and our capacity to care for and connect with each other in a world that is constantly changing. ©bloomberg
