There Is No Such Thing As Unskilled Labor
All labor is skilled. Period. The end.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Colectivo Coffee, which had just become the nation’s largest unionized coffee shop. In the article, I talked about some of the reasons unionizing is good for workers. Union members get paid more than their non-unionized colleagues, for instance, and unions can narrow the wage disparities between those at the top of an organization and the workers relegated to the bottom.
We’ve all worked jobs with wage disparities. Sometimes that’s the result of flat-out discrimination: think two people who have the same title and responsibilities, but one is paid less because of their identity. But then there are cases when people with “prestigious” jobs are paid more than those who work jobs without typical markers of prestige.
In my latest interview, I talked with Rachel Faller, co-founder of tonlé, a zero-waste clothing company that works with garment makers in Cambodia. In this conversation, we talked about how, as fast fashion has become a dominant model in the industry, risk has shifted from brands to garment workers.
It’s common, Rachel says, for companies to make high demands of garment factories, and to require quick turnaround times. You’d think that because garment workers are making more items—fast fashion relies on new pieces of clothing always being available, as opposed to the previous seasonal model, when new clothes came in every six months—they’d be making more money. Instead, the responsibility of supplying an ever-changing wardrobe for consumers has fallen directly on the workers’ shoulders.
Rachel discussed how, during the pandemic, many large clothing brands pulled out of their prior contracts, unwilling to pay garment factories for items they had already commissioned. As wild as this may sound, Rachel was unsurprised:
Rachel: A lot of people from the outside are like, “How can they do that? How can they not pay their workers who made their products?” And the fundamental problem is that those workers are not even considered an important part of those businesses, which is kind of mind-blowing when you think about it…
[We treat] commodified knowledge or creativity as more valuable than labor, or more valuable than the skills that it takes to create a high-quality product or the skills that it takes to farm a high-quality product.
As a society, the way we tacitly justify these sorts of business practices is by assigning value to work—and assigning different values to different types of work. We’re so used to our boss making more money than us, even when we’re the ones who do the majority of the work. We debate minimum wage and CEO salary caps with the belief that many low-wage jobs require no skills—and can be done by anyone—while the job at the top requires a unique visionary who can’t be replicated.
By now, however, most of us know this binary isn’t true. The pandemic has made it quite clear which jobs are necessary and difficult and which aren’t. And yet, we’re still operating within an unequal model of work that barely makes sense. How can we celebrate Labor Day, for example, by giving office workers the day off while hospitality workers plod on, pouring mimosas for ungrateful patrons who are blissfully enjoying their three-day weekend?
The reason, as Rachel said, is that we value the commodification of ideas more than the items they produce. We value the person who designs one T-shirt more than the workers putting that design into practice, and making hundreds or thousands of T-shirts. In the service industry, we value the person who came up with the novel idea to put a restaurant here versus the people who make and serve your food every day.
When I type it out so plainly, it sounds a little absurd. But it’s true: Glassdoor estimates that the owner of a fast-food franchise makes $70,000 a year. The average fast-food employee makes $9.16 an hour, or less than $20,000 per year. But who in this scenario is actually making your food?
When we talk about income inequality, we usually hear terms like “skilled” and “unskilled” labor. These titles are self-explanatory, but they represent the false binary at the heart of our workforce. Every job requires skills. In the case of garment workers, Rachel notes that, “There’s a reason that robots don’t make garments, because they’re hard to make.” You couldn’t walk into any “unskilled” job, anywhere, and just start working. There are hundreds of things we pass off to others—like making our own food, clothing, and furniture—because doing so ourselves would be too difficult.
We’ve structured our society on the premise that ideas are scarce. That the “brilliant mind” of an eccentric leader is more valuable than the people asked to execute the leader’s vision. Part of the reason I wanted to write this piece is because this notion is so insidious that it affects the way we look at our own lives. For all the years I worked in coffee shops, I expected to be paid more to manage the shop than to actually work in it—and I was totally fine serving absent business owners who made more money than me. Even now, middle-income earners feel threatened by the minimum wage conversation, and the idea that someone like a fast-food worker could make as much as them.
Within our current economic system, we are so surrounded by these ideas and hierarchies that it can feel intimidating to challenge them. For Rachel, it took stepping out of the system to imagine how a process like garment production could operate better and more fairly. At a small scale, this has happened in other industries, too: When you see cooperatives or employee-owned businesses, there’s at least some understanding that the value of the business comes from the workers.
But at a large scale, even after all the disruptions of the last 18 months, we’re still trudging through our working lives with these old ideas, and old biases, weighing us down. If the pandemic has been a time for reappraisal, that has to include the way skilled work—all work—is valued and compensated.
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