Unskilled labourers are employed with an intention to make them skillful and to provide them with financial help.
If you've applied for disability benefits and Social Security agrees you can't do your past work, the agency will look at the skill levels of your past jobs to assess whether there are other similarly skilled jobs that you are able to do, despite your physical or mental limitations.
Why the Skill Level of Your Past Work Matters
Skill levels come into play both when Social Security looks at whether there are other jobs you can learn to do and when Social Security assesses whether you fall into any of its "grid rules." The grid rules are a set of charts arranged by RFC that Social Security uses to decide if a person is disabled, based on his or her age, education, and skills. If you have "transferable skills" – knowledge learned at one job that you could use at another job – you can't qualify for disability using the grid rules. (For further explanation, see Nolo's article on the disability grid rules.)
Many times disability applicants think their past jobs are unskilled and that they have no jobs skills. Then they are surprised to be denied for disability benefits because Social Security categorized their job as semi-skilled (and because Social Security says they have job skills they can transfer to a new job). For instance, a shipping and receiving clerk might think he or she is doing unskilled work because the job mainly involves loading and unloading boxes, but Social Security considers this to be is a semi-skilled job, and could find that someone who had worked as a shipping and receiving clerk would have clerical job skills that he or she could use at another type of job.
Skill Levels
Social Security categorizes jobs into skilled work, semi-skilled work, and unskilled work. It relies on the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to classify jobs into these categories. Let's look at what each category of work entails and which category some common jobs fall into.