My beef with Tom

In my "Work and the Labor Process" class we read some parts of Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital and discussed the phenomenon of deskilling work. Then we read some other stuff that rejected that phenomenon and said work was in fact still skilled, it was just a different kind of skill.

For example - Tom did a study on these furniture makers in a factory. He was arguing although the work appeared unskilled it was actually skilled once you took into account their knowledge of the job.  They even made little jigs to help make their job easier or to fix recurring defections.

We had several disagreements about this in class because I could not accept this as "skill".  I think the workers have experience (aka they've been on the job long enough to know from eyeballing if there is a mistake or have even created a jig to make their job easier on themselves) but I don't want to call that skill. You know what you are doing on the job because you've been there and any "inventions" you make to make your life easier perhaps isn't "taking pride in your craft" but a necessity you must do so you don't get sacked at yelled at.

I guess I could be okay with the argument what i'm calling "experience" is accrued "on the job skill" but this is the larger point:

I think Tom was dead set on convincing me it IS skill because IF it is skill then we can say the workers should be remunerated for it accordingly.  But I think if you fall into that argument you end up having to explain how every single job is skilled work and deserves fair pay.  We should just argue that any job regardless of skill deserves a living wage.  Then discussions of what is skilled work and what is not can be separated from whether workers deserve subhuman wages or not.