And: where to look for such jobs? What would be the process to find them with any chance of success?
I hope the question in the title is general enough that more people might find it useful, I’m sure I can’t be the only one. I’m going to include some extra details specific to myself below, but you can just ignore them if you want to.
- I have no education beyond high school and no useful skills, although I do have a couple of years worth of work experience at this point. I don’t really have the will to learn anything new for the purpose of getting a job any more.
- I have been unbelievably lucky in that the circumstances allow me to live on minimum wage in humane conditions, and beyond the basic expenses I have nothing to spend money on anyway. So it doesn’t matter to me how much I get paid.
- I spend all of my free time on things like reading, drawing, writing, thinking, occasionally learning something new. If I could spend even just a couple of work hours every day with a pen and paper and an Internet connection, it would make me a bit happier.
I’ve worked some very simple jobs before as well, and disagree. The simplest I’ve ever done is collecting medical waste from hospitals and packaging them to get mailed out from the site. There were still skills involved.
I wouldn’t call any of those menial tasks skills. Like at that point you might as well list breathing and eating.
A skill is something that any random off the street couldn’t get up to speed on in a day or two. They’re something you have to develop and hone over time to become proficient in.
We can respect and value people in unskilled jobs without playing pretend.
I think a much better definition of a skill is “anything you can get better at”. Take the other commenter who pulled nails out of boards. Sure a random guy off the street could probably do it, but compared to someone whose been doing it for years theyd be a total schmuck. If you watched that experienced worker you’d see how much faster they are, the efficiency and precision in their motions, their ability to instantly analyze the best way to her each and every nail out. There’s a whole genre of online videos of these types of people - experts in seemingly “menial” work and they do numbers because they make people stop and marvel.
That’s awesome if the point of the job is entertainment, but if the work is actually just removing nails from a board, it doesn’t really matter if people stop and gawk, in fact that’d be a detriment as they’d get in the way. And the value difference between the guy removing nails for 20 years and the guy who’s been on the job for an hour is close to nil. As long as the nails come out in a reasonable time, that’s all that matters. And because removing nails from boards is not something that takes any inherent skill, somebody who’s been on the job for an hour will be proficient at the job.
When talking about skilled work vs unskilled work, the definition isn’t “Something you can get better at”, it’s “Something you must get better at to do the job sufficiently”
Sufficiently, proficient - too arbitrary. There’s “skill” associated with all work and therefore all work is skilled work. There’s value in people being good at virtually every kind of work (excluding vulture capitalism, etc.)
EDIT: Also FWIW, if think there’s no difference between the 1 hour vs. 20 year nail puller, my guess is you’re never been even REMOTELY close to this kind of work in your life.
You can split hairs all day and night about how anything from pulling nails from a board, to not pooping your pants at work is technically a “skill” according to the strictest dictionary definition, but to put all your pedantry aside for a moment, there is just no way to actually equate unskilled jobs with skilled jobs. They are just two different things, and the heart of it lies with how much skill is required as a floor to do that job.
If I could do your job adequately with no previous experience with a day’s worth of practice, it’s an unskilled job. If you could put 40 hours a week into education, training, and hands on experience in a job and after a full month you’re still not ready to do that job, that’s a skilled job.
EDIT: Is the heart of your issue that fact that you’re a full time board nail remover? Because that would explain where you’re coming from but it wouldn’t make you right. I think the healthiest conclusion to your train of thought is to understand and accept that the skill level of your job is not the be-all-end-all of the societal worth of your job, only the monetary worth, and money isn’t everything. I’ve worked low skill jobs for very little money that were far more meaningful than the highly skilled, well paying jobs I got later in life which contribute less than nothing to society.
I’ve had a job where the whole thing was removing dirt and nails from demolished barn boards. Genuinely zero skill involved, just a lot of time spent doing the same thing.
I guess you need eyes and hands? And the ability to show up. Those don’t feel much like skills though.
Now be a dishwasher. Or the person at Bucky’s who just goes around picking up trash.
Oh, or the overnight water park security job I’d work part time during the summer. I was just there as a deterrent to anyone who’d like to sneak in and mess around. My training took 20 minutes. “Every 30 minutes just walk around the park. Listen that these 3 pumps are still running and call me if any stop. Call the cops if anyone else is in the park.”