Sometime in 2020, I remember seeing a video in which a number of workers demonstrated how incredible they were at their jobs. I’ve forgotten most of it, and I’ve never seen it again, but the two that stick with me are:

• a supermarket worker masterfully steering a metallic Shai-Hulud comprising dozens of shopping carts back into their receptacle

• a cook reducing a gigantic white onion to fine mince while holding it in his bare, blood-vessel-filled human hand

Some of you may remember other bits from this video. If so, feel free to cancel me in the comments for unequally honoring these heroes.

Better yet, pay for a subscription first, then cancel me, and I might actually feel bad.

Anyway, as you might imagine, the video was widely shared. Primarily that’s because it kicks fifty shades of ass to watch people be ultra-competent on camera, but it’s also because these weren’t well-paid white-collar workers showing off how to construct the world’s most luminous pivot table. These were people whose jobs most of us agree are underpaid, overmanaged, some degree of dangerous, and generally crap to do.¹

Some of us also think of these jobs as devoid of any particular skill. There is a term for such people.

Skill Issues

At this point, “there is no such thing as unskilled labor” (which, in my memory, was the caption posted with the video) is a bedrock assumption of being a leftist on the Internet.

It’s a belief I happen to share. I think anyone who’s seen enough workers in their respective elements would also share it, although at present I’m quite familiar with people refusing to recalibrate opinions based on new information.

Unfortunately, in 2026, five years on from a pandemic that gave the adjective “essential” the Procrustes treatment, three years on from a relitigation of pandemic measures during which a lot of people with suspiciously ample time to post decried “email jobs,”² and two years after the people of the United States made comedy legal again, I think we can safely say that, like many nice sentiments, this one is observed mainly in the breach.

Hardhattism³ has necessarily weird borders on the left. Capitalist propaganda is so successful in the United States that even supposedly-dead-red Communists fear implying anything less than sanctity on the part of coal miners, roughnecks, construction workers, lumberjacks, or the other seven professions you’re required to respect in this country, even though they work for industries that spend millions propping up USian reactionaries, often with their workers’ active support.

Sadly, even if you work outside of those sectors, you need money to buy food, clothing, shelter, and so on. Lefties therefore have to do this weird dance where there may officially be “no” unskilled labor, but some labor is definitely more skilled than other labor. Somehow, no matter how thickly this particular window is dressed in Marxist red, the labor that’s “less” skilled always ends up being the same service, knowledge, and care jobs that the USian right wing already despises.⁴

That’s how we end up with successful podcasters⁵ who think they get to pontificate about the sociological weaknesses of Bullshit Jobs, which is yet more proof that success on social media eventually annihilates the shame center in your brain. That’s how we end up with Jackson Hinkle, long before he was calling himself a “MAGA Communist,” misusing the term PMC to declare that teachers, nurses, and other people who tell you what to do because they have specialized knowledge you don’t are actually oppressors.⁶

At this point, some of you are likely surprised at how long I went into this article without bringing up my own profession. Well, never let it be said that I would disappoint my audience by refusing to protagonize.

Ball and Knowledge

Though noted mittens model Bernie Sanders has a strange penchant for saying unnecessarily dumb stuff that gets him in trouble with his most loyal supporters, the most guff I’ve ever seen people I personally know give him was when his PR team tweeted that, in a country where Gerrit Cole could make $324 million, teachers could make $60,000 a year.

Everything from slapdash “no Bernie” and “this ain’t it” to actual accusations of pitting workers against each other, all because Sanders pointed out that Cole was making 600 times what teachers would—under his ideal policy, which did not exist then and still does not exist now.

Never mind that Sanders was clearly saying there’s enough money in the USian economy to do both, not asking Gerrit Cole to sacrifice a single cent of his three F-35worths of contract money.⁷

Never mind that 600-to-1 is a pay ratio usually reserved for Fortune 500 CEOs.

Baseball fans like numbers, so here’s another one: never mind that, as of 2025, that $60,000 was more than the average teaching salary in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia.

Adjusted for inflation, $60,000 was about $75,313 in June of 2025, when the NEA’s current pay data ends. At the risk of sounding like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming—35 states, 70 percent of the United States Senate—all fell under that line in 2024-2025. Hawaii and Minnesota barely clear it.

Meanwhile, as of 2026, the median salary in MLB is $1.4 million dollars. According to that article, 519 out of the 780 players on 26-man rosters are making at least $1 million, and while it’s accepted wisdom online that every guy whose name you can’t immediately recognize is working for pennies, only 31 of those 780 players are officially on the $780,000 minimum.⁸

They don’t keep all of their money, and $1.4 million doesn’t buy what it used to, but let’s call bread bread and wine wine here: for the most part, ballplayers are not poor.

In prior decades, you could at least say that a lot of them blow through all their money after their careers are over—but increasingly, MLB teams are explicitly preparing players to not go broke the moment they can’t hit or throw a baseball properly. I know, because when I’ve been really desperate to leave teaching before, I’ve almost applied to jobs doing that.

There’s this trope online that pro athletes just sit their money in a savings account like us peons and spend the rest of their natural lives waiting for the interest to be meaningful.

Not only does this fly in the face of the same youthful male psychology that’s used to excuse a bunch of the other things they do, but when you have a high-six-figure income and live in this economy held together by bullshit and magic words, you’d be a fool not to get in on every possible investment grift. If extra outfielder types can make millions trading NFTs, I think they’re doing okay as a class.⁹

You may be surprised to learn that my objective here is not to complain about how much money ballplayers make. Rather, I bring this all up to establish exactly how infuriating it is that when someone, be it Bernie Sanders sketching out a policy ideal or a right-winger pretending they care a solitary iota about anything other than serving capital, brings up the disparity between how well these two professions are paid, the response from a lot of supposedly left-leaning sports fans goes something like this:

I’d like to see an elementary school teacher hit a dinger.

Well, let’s start with obvious. I’d like to see Kyle Tucker, shorn entirely of the cachet of being an incredibly famous and now quite wealthy professional baseball player, run a fifth-grade classroom for a year. I’d love to hand Bryce Harper my notes for a semester and have him design a fair final exam. Give Paul Skenes a collection of kids who have absolutely no reason to listen to him prattle about how much he wishes he were drone-striking Iranian leadership and let’s see what happens.

Okay, sure, the men I’ve mentioned above have certain physical gifts that make it impossible for the lady who told you to stop passing notes in sixth grade to equal their achievements. Fine. In that case, I find it strange that in 2026, when college and high school baseball have wider presences than ever before, so many people have trouble with the idea that educators have not spent their entire lives taking care of other people’s children. I’ve been in the room with the guy whom Adley Rutschman tied for RsBI in the College World Series. I’m guessing he’s hit one out before. Does that mean his building should pay him at least MLB minimum?

Notably, this doesn’t happen when pro athletes are compared instead to, say, farmers. I suspect this is because if you were to jocularly ask Javier or Julio to hit a home run to prove he’s worth big money, everyone would work up the nerve to call you an asshole.

Finally, it has to be said: the correct response to someone using teachers as stalking horses against pro athletes, when it is obvious that they do not respect either public education or the possibility that anyone outside of the bourgeoisie might acquire sufficient wealth to stop having to sell their labor, is to point out that fundamental mendacity, rather than implicitly grant their premise that certain people’s labor deserves to be rewarded more than others.

There’s that Stephen Jay Gould quote, incredibly popular online, about how many Einsteins have wasted away in cotton fields or sweatshops, the point of which is to emphasize that the circumstances that produce an Einstein are societal, political, and economic choices we make.

We choose which jobs to reward, which skills to prize, which values to exalt, and—most to the point—which scarcities to enforce.

Clearly, some of us are fine with the choices this country has made.