Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

I think a lot of commenters here are projecting this article onto their work lives as tech office workers, but it's really more about the world of unskilled and semi-skilled service/gig workers, like handymen, furniture assemblers, delivery drivers, and so on.

All these things can be true and they reinforce each other: The jobs suck <-> The people willing to do them aren't very happy, skilled or competent <-> The pay is minuscule. And we can't seem to get out of this Nash Equilibrium.

None of those listed jobs is actually unskilled labor. Driving a big truck around narrow roads is a skill most don’t have, doing it at speed and running up and down to actually move the heavy packages is a skill most don’t have. Assembling furniture is a skill most don’t have, especially with complex engineered wood products that will break if stressed wrong. Handymen is literally just a collection of skilled labor jobs rolled into one guy that can handle small home improvement projects like carpentry, masonry, plumbing, and electrical. These are specialized jobs that have wrongly been labeled “un-skilled” or “semi-skilled” as if knowledge work is the only skill of value…

Very, very little labor is unskilled. In almost any work there is a massive difference in quality and speed between someone who has been doing it for <6 months vs. someone who has been doing it for >3 years.

My theory is that "unskilled labor" was a term of propaganda invented by an earlier generation of business leaders in order to publicly devalue many labor-intensive roles. That generation knew that it was a lie, but the business leaders that followed were taught that "unskilled labor" was axiomatic, and essentially "drank the kool-aid".

The result of this is that the labor pool for many disciplines has been hollowed out because it's no longer financially sustainable for workers to build the skills needed to excel in those roles.

Yes, it's propaganda. If the corporatists can convince people that a previously well-paid job (working in a slaughterhouse, for instance) is actually "unskilled labor," they're one step closer to convincing people it should pay less, and that it's a job no one you know would take so they have to import cheap labor to do it.