Trashing experience and skill is just one more weapon in the war on workers

Forget football for a sec. There are a lot of jobs that shouldn't be done
without a lot of training and experience. The role of training and experience was glaringly obvious in the National Football League's lockout of its longtime officials. Glaringly obvious as in, the scabs the NFL brought in to replace the experienced referees were first a national laughingstock and then even more widely reviled for their errors on the field. It turns out not just anyone can officiate a professional football game. But what about other kinds of workers?

We're told that part of the American character is to work hard and take pride in it, and that's reflected in what we see around us. It's not just people whose work results in big paychecks or offers the chance to climb the career ladder quickly or get public recognition, it's a value as alive among low-wage workers as among the highest-paid. But something you hear a lot less about than the value of hard work is the value of skill. This is weird, because presumably if you're working hard, one of the things you're working at is getting good at what you do. If you're taking pride in your hard work, it's not just pride in how tired you are at the end of the day but at how well you did things, how accurate or efficient you were, how you got something right that not everyone would have gotten right.

But when there's a labor dispute, or when Republicans are trying to undermine how voters think about other workers to set the stage for taking away pensions or collective bargaining rights, suddenly, to hear them talk, you'd never know that this was a nation that values hard work, because in those moments we're told it's not that hard, any idiot could do this job. It's not that hard to referee a professional football game, so call up the guys who washed out of the Lingerie Football League. Experience is overrated for teachers, so throw people into the classroom after a few weeks' training, they'll do fine. More than fine! The youth and energy of the barely trained new teacher will be better than the experience of that useless old teacher. Suddenly, the drive to denigrate the workers becomes so strong that the CEO or the governor asks us, expects us, to forget the years of work that these workers have put into learning their jobs, learning how to teach or to run a snowplow or a cash register.

As the AP's Paul J. Weber writes, "Professing expertise can also bring on suspicions of elitism and scratch an itch to knock someone down a peg"'an itch that the Roger Goodells and Scott Walkers and Mitt Romneys of the world and the generations of union-busters and racers-to-the-bottom who laid the groundwork for them will hasten to throw poison ivy onto. Hell, if you're not itching, they'll sneak up behind you with the poison ivy. But as Weber details, it's not just on the football field that experience and the commitment that comes from doing a job for years matter.

(Continued below the fold.)