- What is labor?
- Direct and indirect labor
- Skilled and unskilled labor
- Management workforce
- Commercial workforce
We explain what labor is and its different types: direct or indirect, skilled or unskilled, managerial and commercial.
What is labor?
In economic terms, labor is understood as both the physical and mental effort carried out by a employee to manufacture, repair, or maintain a good, as well as the economic remuneration that such work implies, that is, the price of the services of work.
Any type of productive or service initiative requires a workforce. It is precisely this capacity for work that working class has to exchange in the economic circuit, generally in exchange for a salary.
The total number of available workers in a country, that is, the majority of its economically active population (PEA), can be considered as your workforce. Depending on the labor, social and tax requirements contemplated by the legal system of that country, it may be more expensive or cheaper for your eventual employers.
Labor in its current sense was born alongside Industrial Revolution, when peasant workers migrated to the cities to become industrial workers.
Today it is a population much more diverse, among which are the professionals and the self-employed, as well as other sectors whose importance in the economic circuit is constantly threatened by the pressures of the increasing automation and technologization of the production process.
Direct and indirect labor
A first distinction within what is labor requires differences:
- Direct labor. It is the one that is involved in the productive circuit. Their tasks, indispensable, can easily be associated with the good or the service obtained. Workers in a compote factory, for example, are direct labor, attached to the company's payroll.
- Indirect labor. It is the set of workers who do not intervene immediately in productive work, but rather accompany, optimize and control it from an administrative, commercial, etc. perspective. In the case of the compote factory, the area coordinators, those in charge of the marketing, accountants and recruiters are indirect labor.
Skilled and unskilled labor
Skilled workers have received some degree of instruction or training training without which they would not be able to carry out certain tasks (or not effectively).
On the contrary, unskilled labor are those workers who have not received any type of instruction and have only their work force to offer.
Obviously, skilled workers are always more desirable and tend to cost much more than unskilled workers, as they possess specialized knowledge and / or experience which in turn cost weather and money to acquire.
Management workforce
The administrative and managerial positions of a company are often referred to as a management workforce. business or organization, in charge of the directive and executive tasks of the productive circuit. These are salaried but highly trained personnel, destined to trust work and whose participation in the productive circuit is not direct, but conducting.
Commercial workforce
The set of workers who are not directly linked to the product manufacturing circuit is known as commercial labor. On the contrary, they participate in its last stage of commercialization: distributors, sellers, traders, etc.
They are more or less specialized forms of labor whose task is to get the product to their consumers natural and finalize the economic transaction of its consumption.