[Related sidenote] Did you ever work in the fields? It's actually a very skilled job if you want to make enough money to survive. I picked pears once and it wasn't easy. But the migrant farm workers were really good at it, filled their bins in no time. I barely filled one bin in an entire day. [/sidenote]
I dunno.
I've worked the french fryer, at McDonald's. i've worked the grill and the register at McDonald's. I've worked light custodial for minimum wage at a demolition yard. I've worked temp gigs doing inventory for small businesses. I've worked as a delivery driver for an auto parts wholesaler.
I once worked a gig that was simply assembling trade association information packets, to be sent out to association members. That was a pretty sweet gig. The association did so many packets that they'd invested in an industrial-grade printer-collator-finisher machine. They'd also invested in a large workbench where the assembler could easily lay out all the different components of the packet in their respective stacks, and pull from each stack in turn to assemble a packet. The first day of that job was me figuring out how to lay out all the "ingredients" in a way that minimized extra arm motions and kept my body flowing optimally from the beginning to the end of each packet I assembled. The remaining three months of that job were me with my headphones on, grooving to music and motion.
All those jobs are characterized in part by how long it took to grasp the basic qualifications, and the relatively short range of value add between little experience and a lot of experience.
A french fryer with ten years of experience at McDonald's is probably going to be about as good at that job as it's possible to get. But ten years in, those extra years of experience aren't actually adding a lot of value to the product, over what you'd get from someone with ten hours of experience.
Compare with my current job: Site reliability engineering for enterprise development/operations. Ten hours of "experience" doesn't even count as experience. Ten months of experience at a smaller job - systems administration, application operations, etc. - might be enough to get your foot in the door as a junior SRE. Ten years on, the value I add and the compensation I'm justified in asking has progressed far beyond what a fry cook with ten years of experience could ever dream of.
If you told me that "entry level" jobs are skilled labor too, I'd laugh in your face. Not because I didn't develop skills and deepen my practice in every entry level job I ever held for more than a week. I'd laugh because I've worked those jobs, and they don't hold a candle to the kind of training and experience you need to do the kind of job I do now, and they don't have the growth potential in value add and compensation increases, of the kind of job I do now.
For sure a fruit picker gets skilled with practice. And they get paid more, too, as the number of baskets they can pick per day goes up. But anyone can show up and start picking. And even the top pickers are only going to pick so much. At the end of the day, their productivity and their profits are limited by their physical capability. This kind of physical labor is easily accessible to almost everyone. However, it's probably the least efficient use of human potential there is. I get paid more than the top fruit pickers not because I put in more physical effort, but because I've spent a decade or more mastering knowledge skills that magnify my productivity far more than perfecting the optimal pear-picking motion for my body.
For sure fruit picking is skilled labor, technically speaking. But technically correct is the worst kind of correct. Nobody wants to hear their defense attorney say, "don't worry, I'm skilled the way a fruit picker is skilled!" Nobody wants their bookkeeping done by a CPA whose CV opens with "you know how a McDonald's fry cook is doing skilled labor? Same thing with me." Nobody wants to be treated by a doctor who thinks that becoming a skilled healthcare professional is the same basic process as becoming a skilled hotel housekeeper.
There are jobs that anyone with a healthy body and a functional mind can walk into, pick up right away, and get paid for with little or no additional training. These are typically jobs that pay near the bottom of the scale, simply because "anyone" can do them, and they don't tend to become more valuable with more experience.
There are other jobs that require a lot more training and experience, and are not really open to everyone to try out. In many careers, you'll spend years and money just to qualify for consideration, and then years more working your way up to something really worthwhile.
Your own anecdote is illustrative. You could have stuck around and become a skilled fruit-picker. Instead, you became a Nurse. I bet you believe that mastering nursing has been a much more productive use of your potential than mastering fruit-picking ever would have been. Even though it means you will never pick the perfect pear.
