The local Starbucks over the years has had many turnovers in the staff. It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.
That makes it unskilled labor.
Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.
It usually takes about 3 days for a new worker to learn the job.
Starbucks hires juniors and trains them to be good baristas. That takes a long time. Just because someone is able to work a coffee machine after a few days doesn't mean they're not skilled eventually. Your argument is like saying 'it only takes a few days for junior devs to be onboarded, so there's no real value in senior devs'.
It doesn’t take a phd to make a coffee, no matter how fancy the cinnamon/cocoa heart is.
All you're saying here is that you've failed to see the value in customer service, hospitality, speed, accuracy, politeness, etc that go with a retail coffeeshop job. The coffee is the same in pretty much every Starbucks, but the experience can vary wildly depending on how good the baristas are at everything else besides making coffee. Those skills take years to master.
Yes, that’s what I’m sort of saying. I haven’t failed to see any of that. But it doesn’t take a phd to make coffee politely or less politely. All I want is the coffee. Don’t ask me what my name is. I don’t care about the „experience”.
You do care about the experience though. Everyone does. If you have a bad experience you'll complain, or stop going to that Starbucks, or moan to your friends. To you, by the sounds of things, a good experience consists of asking for your order, paying, and getting out fast. An experienced retail worker will be able to read all that from your cues - not engaging in small talk, having your payment ready, moving along quickly, etc. They'll factor those things into their interactions with you, they'll remember you next time, and they'll make the experience what you want. All that takes time to learn, and few retail workers get good at it. I will concede that it doesn't require a PhD though. Few jobs do.
How could you possibly know that it takes “3 days” to get good at being a barista? You should try it out sometime, with a 50 person line. I’m sure it’ll be a cake walk and your labor will be fairly compensated. I’ll even give you a 3 day head start just to be fair!
You can do the basic job after 3 days and after a month rush hour won't be a problem either. I've done similar jobs, the skill cap is not that high.
My labour won't be fairly compensated which is why i don't do jobs like that anymore, but they're not hard to learn.
To be fair, Starbucks purchases machines that are automated to a much higher degree than your standard high end espresso machine you'd find in a local shop. It's a lot more button pushing in the correct sequence, a lot less art. This is standard procedure for a multinational fast food service company: they want things automated and streamlined not only for speed of service and easy training, but consistency of the product.
From what I heard from a former Starbucks barista, the biggest challenge was to not scald the milk during steaming (which is not very difficult, basically just requires holding it at the correct angle to induce a whirlpool effect and keep things moving).
The skilled aspect is dealing with customers efficiently and pleasantly, and all the nuance/craziness that can entail.
They likely meant that onboarding takes three days. As there is no meaningful metric for competence beyond that (or at least no metric that is measured and used) "good" doesn't apply.
There are of course tons of ways a good, seasoned barista distinguishes themselves from a trainee with 3 days of onboarding but those are externalities. The difference between skilled and unskilled labor is not whether competence and experience can make a difference but whether that difference is measured as performance or only affects externalities.
I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company. Notably these often do involve skill that directly contributes to performance but because the job is considered unskilled, it's instead treated as some nebulous a priori form of intelligence and personal aptitude. What's more, beyond a certain point skill is often actively punished (e.g. by raising quotas to take advantage of higher productivity, resulting in more work for the same pay).
>> I.e. "unskilled labor" is not about the worker but about the company
That part really stood out to me.
While a lot of us can agree that barista is an unskilled job, I heard people call barmen labor a skilled labor.
Which is crazy, because it's essentially the same job (mix stuff up and serve in a cup). But it makes sense if "unskilled labor" is a function of an employer not an employee
Knowing professional welders myself, and trying my hand at welding, it takes a lot more than 30 days to get good at it. A welder also needs to learn some chemistry, all kinds of techniques, the strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of welds, how to prep the weld, etc.
A good weld is a thing of beauty.
Welding is also pretty dangerous. It takes a good welder to do it safely, and do it without ruining very expensive parts.
There's good reason that competent welders get paid a lot of money.
In 30 days, the new welder probably has learned how not to set himself on fire, blind himself, fill his lungs with poisonous gasses, etc.
Sure but unless you're Tesla, welding quality is more relevant to your bottom line than coffee making quality (yes, I'm aware there's more to being a good barista than just making the coffee).
> You can onboard welding in less than 30 days too.
You can be doing useful work as part of a welding group in 30 days, but you will not be a master. Grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't and all that.
> How could you possibly know that it takes “3 days” to get good at being a barista?
Because I have gone to the same Starbucks every day for many years, and see many new hires as the staff turns over. It takes about 3 days to go from "cannot operate the cash register" to "efficiently fulfills customer orders".
Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.
It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US.
> Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days.
You're not going to learn welding in 30 days. Nor are you going to learn how to design a bridge. Or program in C++. Or diagnose a patient. Or be a lawyer. Or drive a race car. Etc.
I didn't say all jobs, did I? You successfully listed (some) jobs that might take longer than 30 days to learn.
The thing about "unskilled" jobs, everyone seems to look down their noses at, is that they facilite the people doing the lofty jobs of: lawyer, doctor, c++ programmer, etc. Without them getting done for you you couldn't do what you're doing.
Can the brickie work without their "unskilled" laborer? Sure, but good luck getting you house built in a reasonable time.
I don't understand your point. Yes, there's a lot of unskilled jobs, possibly a majority of jobs. Far from everyone looks down on unskilled jobs, and nobody is saying they're not important.
Credentialism has certainly gone too far in many fields, but I’d still like my doctors, lawyers, and engineers to have more than 30 days of training in their field.
Where are all these js devs on minimum wage going paycheck-to-paycheck?
I think everything is easy, given the right approach and mindset, or everything is approachable given the right approach and mindset and will to put enough effort to get to a given outcome.
The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work?
On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.
That's just playing with words. Putting Gordon Ramsay in the same bucket as "burger flipper" makes as much sense as putting Linus Torvalds in the same bucket as "keyboard monkey".
> With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.
Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.
On a relative scale, I agree with you that the amount of training involved differs for accountants and burger flippers, thus this is a good example.
On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.
I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.
That makes it unskilled labor.
Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.