By James Pethokoukis

This is an extremely “of the moment” sort of controversy in 2020 America. In his first week on the job, New York City Mayor Eric Adams sparked a debate about the term “low-skill workers” because of remarks he gave at a press conference. “My low-skilled workers, my cooks, my dishwashers, my messengers, my shoe-shine people, those who work at Dunkin’ Donuts — they don’t have the academic skills to sit in the corner office,” Adams said as he attempted to make a statement about remote work and how office workers were so important to the city’s economy.

Some people really didn’t like Adams’ use of the descriptor “low skill” as shorthand for jobs that don’t require a high level of education or training. They argued that “low-skilled” perpetuates myths about service sector work. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former NYC waitress tweeted: “The suggestion that any job is ‘low skill’ is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little/no healthcare, and low wages. Plus being a waitress has made me and many others *better* at our jobs than those who’ve never known that life.”

“Low-wage” is preferable to “low-skill” since even workers doing what may seem objectively like highly skilled work may not make a high wage if there’s little market demand for it. A football lineman and an Olympic heavyweight wrestler are both highly-skilled big guys, but the former makes a lot more than the latter.

Anyway, it’s worth taking a moment to view what really drives worker wages. And the answer is: lots of things, of course, including the bargaining power of workers. Example: “No-poaching agreements” are common in the low-wage labor market and may lower wages by reducing the job options available to workers.

But as AEI economist Michael Strain writes in “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It),” worker productivity “is the baseline against which wages are set” even though deviations from that baseline occur regularly. This is why policy should help people obtain market-valued skills that make them more productive. More from Strain (who uses “low-wage” rather than “low-skill” in his excellent book):

Intuitively, productivity should be a key determinant of wages. If a worker can only produce, say, $12 per hour of revenue, then why would his employer pay him $15 per hour over any length of time? There is a limit to how far a business can push its wages below those being offered elsewhere in the market. That business will find its workers increasingly averse to putting in a hard day’s work and will find it increasingly difficult to hire and retain workers. Market forces are very influential in real-world business decisions.

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