What Makes Labor ‘Skilled’ or ‘Unskilled’? Author Blair Imani Explains

In this excerpt from Read This to Get Smarter about Race, Class, Gender, Disability, and More, author Blair Imani breaks down labor and class.
Young people on white circles against turquoise background
Klaus Vedfelt

There’s an increasingly large gap between the information we’re taught in school and the information we actually need to better understand ourselves, others, and the institutions we live within. What happens if we have toxic family relationships? How do we apologize effectively? What should we do if the name we were given doesn’t fit our current understanding of self?

Read This to Get Smarter is my contribution to helping myself and others better understand this journey that we call life. Getting smarter means working toward a more informed, compassionate, and empathetic world where we are creating space for the truths we embody instead of the assumptions and expectations that are imposed on us.

In the United States and countless other countries shaped by Eurocolonialism, there’s great emphasis placed on our productivity. “Who we are” becomes almost inextricably linked with “what we do,” “how fast we do it,” “how much money we make,” and how these constructs of productivity and functionality shape how society views our “worth.”

The idea that people have inherent worth and deserve to be housed, fed, accommodated, and cared for by virtue of being alive is hard for many people to agree with. No one should have to “earn” the right to basic human dignities.

Read This to Get Smarter starts with ourselves and looks outward, with six chapters covering identity, relationships, class, disability, race and racism, and sex, gender and sexual orientation. Each section is an open and nonjudgmental invitation to examine and deconstruct the assumptions and expectations that Eurocolonial society forces onto us. I intersperse personal and family stories throughout, and include helpful charts and definitions to keep your learning as streamlined and as accessible as possible.

When I initially began writing Read This to Get Smarter I was intent on not writing a chapter on relationships, and thought I certainly wouldn’t write about class, status, and economic theories. My colleagues/friends Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Dr. Shay-Akil Mclean encouraged me to read Gerald Horne, Claudia Jones, and Kwame Nkrumah. I had to confront my discomfort with the dynamics of human interconnectedness, and how beliefs about human worth and value are deeply tied to the lies we’re constantly fed about class, status, and economic theories. I soon realized that we cannot do better for ourselves, others, or the world around us if we do not have an understanding of class systems.

I care deeply about education, and in the course of writing this book I’ve had the joy and honor of working with and learning from leaders in countless fields of study and practice. I hope to pass that knowledge onto my readers and help them get smarter, too.

LABOR AND CLASS

After I graduated from college, I moved to Washington, DC, to attend the Howard University School of Law. My decision to go to law school was uni­versally praised, but the experience itself was not what I expected. Instead of committing myself to something I could not tolerate for the next three years, I dropped out after only seven weeks. Dropping out was the right choice for me, but it was made more difficult by many of my friends and family members who dismissed and doubted my decision. It was during this time that I realized just how much emphasis we place on our rela­tionship to work and education as it relates to our worth. This emphasis can be understood as meritocracy, or the political ideology that affords power, access, and influence to people based on perceived merit. Merit is a characteristic or action deserving of honor or esteem, and in theory, a meritocracy would reward those deemed most worthy due to their ability, skills, or work ethic rather than perpetuate a society ruled by those with the most access to power. The problem with a meritocracy is that what constitutes “merit” is deeply subjective and dependent on context. What our society deems honorable, worthy, and valuable is fundamentally based in ableism, racism, sexism, classism, and other systems of oppression. 

I didn’t have a plan when I dropped out of law school, but I knew I needed a source of income, so I joined a childcare agency and started work­ing as a nanny and babysitter for a few DC families. The money was good, the work was fulfilling, the hours were flexible, and I was often asked to travel with the families on vacation at no expense to me. Thanks to classism however, I was quickly reminded that the way work is viewed socially is not only a matter of the wages we earn or the opportunities our work allows us, but the prestige or stigma assigned to how we earn our wages. When I would attend social and cultural events in DC on my days off, the question that immediately followed meeting a new person was “What do you do?” This question was never a philosophical one. It was the shorthand version of asking “What do you do for a living?” or “What is your job?” At the time, my job was being a nanny, so that was what I would answer. Almost every time, I would notice the eyes of the person I was in conversation with immediately glaze over with disinterest. I meet new people now and tell them I am an author and educator, I generally do not have that same experience. Because my work is “intellectual” or considered by society to be merited, my personhood is generally regarded by classist structures as having a higher value based solely on my work and corresponding perceptions. 

The work we do is usually described as labor, and not all labor is valued equally by society. Nor are all laborers viewed equally to each other because of the simultaneous role of other systems of oppression. Labor has generally been divided into a binary of skilled and unskilled work in Eurocolonial contexts, and modern understandings often describe labor as unskilled, semiskilled, skilled, and professional. All these definitions refer to how specialized the work is.

  • UNSKILLED LABOR: not requiring special skills or training.
  • SEMISKILLED LABOR: requiring some, but not extensive, skills or training.
  • SKILLED LABOR: requiring special skills, training, knowledge, and ability.
  • PROFESSIONAL LABOR: requiring extensive or advanced skills and education.

This division of labor by “skill” values most the labor of the “highly educated” professional class, which within Eurocolonial society is made exclusive to white men with access to capital. Everyone is skilled at something, and usually more than one thing. However, these classifications of labor by skill level (which are compensated accordingly) have been defined almost exclusively by European and Eurocolonial perspectives, values, and philosophies. This compensation does not occur outside of oppressive factors, and it’s not an accident that the labor that is generally considered to be unskilled or low skilled has historically been relegated to marginalized people. Those who are deemed less valuable by society are pushed into work that is deemed less valuable by society. Regrettably, this limited understanding commonly informs wages and salaries, and in many countries, it informs who may be granted a visa or citizenship. It can also dictate who has access to health insurance and health care.

Getting smarter about class means understanding the power dynamics connected to it, which requires an intersectional approach. Intersectionality, a term coined in 1989 by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a framework that requires us to consider multiple forms of oppression at one time. Keep in mind that intersectionality is not just us naming our identities, but also our context and the ways that systems of oppression either harm or benefit us accordingly, and we must include class analysis in addition to the many other aspects that make up our identities. When approaching our understanding of labor and work from an intersectional perspective, the gender and racial wage gap offers an apt example. In the United States, March 24 is Equal Pay Day, or the number of days into a year it would theoretically take a white woman to work to make the same amount of money in a particular job as a white man had the previous year. So, for example, if a white man made $100,000 in one calendar year (365 days), a white woman impacted by the sexist wage gap would theoretically not make that same amount of money until March 24 of the following year (448 days). Simultaneously, the white man in this example would be 83 days into making his next $100,000. Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is even later in the year in August, reflecting that Black women not only experience a sexist wage gap, but also a racist one. These inequalities reveal that compensation is not exclusively based on the type of labor, but is also informed by how society values and devalues the person doing that labor. 

Getting smarter about class means understanding that our worth and right to live well is not tied to whether we do labor, what kind of labor we do, or how productive we are at that labor. All people deserve to be recognized as inherently worthy by virtue of our existence, and we should not be ranked in a hierarchy based on how much we contribute—or are perceived to contribute—to an economy or a society.

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