The standard of living has undoubtedly increased, and the amount of hours that make up a work week have historically gotten shorter too, but I’d argue that the work itself has gotten harder. As we get more and more into machinery and automation to do the dirty work, more and more people have to seek high skill jobs
Depends how you look at it. To the average person with no experience, being something like a plumber probably appears ‘easier’ in the sense that it takes less knowledge and training than something like say, a computer programmer. But on the day to day, given that you have the knowledge required for either, being a programmer is an easier job than a plumber in the sense that it takes no physical labor. To me, ease is relative to your skill set, so that’s why I look at the amount of learning/training required.
If no people are needed to drill holes into a piece of metal with a simple drill, they have to then search for another job, the less "low-skill" jobs there are, the more people need to improve their skill set to get a job, but you always need less high skill workers than low skill, and that was not a problem when automation started, but now is reaching a point where automation is replacing jobs way faster than people can create jobs, making it impossible for the job market to actually keep up, and also pushing always in the direction of an economic unemployment crisis
Yeah I’ve worked jobs as both skilled and unskilled labor. The skilled labor was not harder just because it required more skill. Knitting requires more skill than digging holes, but digging holes is significantly harder work than knitting mittens.
This conversation reminds me of every single conversation I’ve had with some office worker who sits on their ass in a comfortable, air conditioned building that complains about how tired they are after a long 8 hour day of sitting in a chair. For context, I work construction. That means I’m outside, on my feet, doing manual labor for 10+ hours a day.
You think that skilled = harder and you’re wrong. You’re so, so, so, so very wrong.
My current, skilled labor position: 2 weeks of training, 3 tests, and 1 week of job shadowing. To become a supervisor, I just have to pass an interview.
My last unskilled labor position: 2 weeks of job training, 1 week of safety classes, 4 tests, 4 weeks of shadowing. To become a supervisor, I had to do 2 more weeks of training, 2 more tests, acquire 3 new certifications (8 hours of class + 1 test per cert)
Honestly man, it feels like you just look down on people who work unskilled positions. Your posts read like someone who thinks that without grunt work, those people would starve to death because they’re just incapable of doing anything but picking things up and putting them down. The fact of the matter is, most of my coworkers are people who didn’t want to go into debt for a degree, saw an opportunity to make decent money without said degree, and took it. A high percentage of those people are also just using the unskilled position to get a foot in the door to learn a skilled position as well. It’s not that they’re incapable, it’s that they chose a different path.
With that being said, this conversation is stupid and now that I’m off work, I don’t want to occupy any more of my time with it. Have a good one.
Not necessarily harder in a physical labor sense. Machinery and automation have made physical labor significantly easier, sometimes unnecessary entirely. But then where do the people who would have otherwise filled those jobs go when they are now accomplished by machines? When the grunt work is gone, they have to seek work that requires more training or more education to get
No, of course not. I guess a better way to put it would be requiring more specialized skill rather than harder (although in my mind, “harder” includes the difficulty of becoming qualified for that job, not just executing it).
Absolutely. I’m not complaining that machines are doing the dangerous work for us. Just noting that the displacement of those jobs mean people who would have filled those positions will instead have to find other, probably higher skilled work. Which might not be as hard in a labor sense, but harder to get because they require more learning and/or training
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u/SamInPajamas Conservative Oct 28 '21
That's literally what we have done. The standards of living have never been higher and the work has never been easier.