The dirty blue collars don’t get the protection and long term support they need. I think there is a thought that they will quit or die before the company gets hooked for long term healthcare. It’s really one more reason why they should be first in line to vote for universal healthcare. It’s also another reason why pensions were a good thing. Spend your useful years and physical health for a proper retirement.
My brother in law died recently. He is the only member of my family I gave a shit about. He worked for a few years at a place where they made light poles. I visited him once. It was a toxic nightmare. He left that job to work for Terminix. He worked there for nearly a decade. He died last year of cancer after a years long battle at 60.
I worked in my twenties at chemical plants, power boilers and nuke plants. I didn’t quit even after I noticed how all these people who were twenty to thirty years older than me were dying and how they were dying. I quit when three other men in my age group two of them very healthy and one who was a alcoholic died within months of each other after being doused with chemicals when they cut into a void while wrecking out a storage tank at a 3M plant I had worked at.
Now thirty years later all of the friends I knew who were boilermakers during that time are gone including one who now that I look back on it was a father figure to me.
“Kid, you’re 18 now. You have to decide. Do you want to breathe toxic fumes the rest of your life or sit in front of a computer for 10 hours a day?”
In a lot of places, you do both.
Engineering definitely lets you you enjoy both options simultaneously. I’ve dealt with liquid nitrogen leaks, a near miss with an icicle falling on me, battery fires, and seen accidental finger sticks with used medical devices. Working with spreadsheets, test reports, and programming scripts in a noisy open concept office is usually the better experience. Usually.
Yeah, I like the exercise of going to the plant floor, the fumes and needing to stick my hands in heavy machinery, not so much
Ahhh you’ve met my office-mate.
I mean, yeah, but things should be better for desk workers too. We’re all being taken advantage of in different ways. I was WAAAAAAAAY happier working in auto shops and occasionally getting injured than I ever have been working in IT. If I could make ends meet doing that I’d go back in a heartbeat. It’s fucked that anyone doing skilled or dangerous work should struggle to own a home and live comfortably.
Look, I’m not going to sugar coat this. I have been a machinist for 16 years. I witnessed someone turning into mist via lathe. The entire company closed for a month. I wish I had problems like “Oh shit I pushed bad code to prod!”
Oh my God I’m so sorry. That sounds haunting.
It has given me ptsd. There was also the time a guy drilled his finger in half.
All ill say, is that both environments do their own type of damage. Physical work leads to things like physical injuries, death, etc. Deskjobs are usually mental health problems. I tend to lean toward jobs that can cause bodily harm being worse, but thats NOT to say that damage to mental health cant be debilitating in its own way.
Yeah, I have notice that everyone I know who got burned out at least once has less energy and is very strict with bed time and “me time” even tho they are “back to normal”. And also the suicide rate at some countries office workplaces.
Extremes are never good regardless of workplace.
Deskjobs are usually mental health problems.
But still, usually, less than the mental health issues that blue collar jobs tend to present.
Blue collar/service work gets the worst of both worlds. Shitty people, office politics, and high stress, just like with white collar, but then adding on more physical strain and discomfort, less economic security, and the mental health burden of being less physically safe (including the mental health impact of watching people get hurt or age poorly), and having less social respect.
It’s not even close, in my opinion. Blue collar workers have it shittier, and we should be doing more to improve their working conditions.
I’ll even add that it’s not as straightforward as “blue collar physical, white collar mental.” Shitty blue collar jobs could mean no time at home, verbal abuse from the boss, and just generally dealing with the “blue collar culture” of sex jokes and misogyny. And that doesn’t even include the possibility of ptsd from seeing a coworker get fatally injured.
There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing chips fly and that solid block of steel turn into something underneath my tools. You would have to pay me an excessive wage to have me sit in front of a screen instead standing on a lathe or mill.
I mean…that’s where the excessive wages are…so
Beautiful and bleak
I worked in a Mexican restaurant for two months. I burned my finger on the beans pot on my first day, and my hands were always wet from washing dishes, so it didn’t heal until after I quit.
I actually like using excel.
Yesterday one of my colleagues announced he had a headache so was going to have a nap. We all just wished him well and carried on without him.
Compare that to most farm workers who are lucky to have all 4 major limbs.
Today I worked a corporate event. It was a lunch for all the bigwigs celebrating the completion of a freeway… that was completed 10 years ago.
These people just spend all day jerking eachother off while the guys who actually built the road are still out there working.
That’s a constant at any big company, regardless of the type of work the company does as a whole. The higher-ups talk to each other and down to the rank-and-file in nonsense corporate-speak, congratulating each other for accomplishments they had little to do with or even actively impeded. Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work just go about their day, getting things done.
Every once in a while, we all get together and try to decipher what the “leaders” actually meant in their big presentation about the plans for the company in the coming year and it’s going to affect us.
i love shitposts that are way more well-written than they have any business being haha
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Those people aren’t saying desk jobs are worse or even “just as bad” to make physical laborers feel better; it’s a word of warning to those with so-called “safe” jobs to be cautious of issues many people aren’t aware of.
yep. I’m just tired of people not recognizing the very real dangers of desk jobs and long hours. look at any engineering department and you’ll see fat guys that can’t move, and seemingly healthy people with issues.
yes, we’re not about to cut our fingers off at our desk. but being at your desk for 50+ hours a week has real consequences on your body, that have very real effects on your life outside of work. and you need to know about that and handle it.
It’s more about total impact on the general population. While working labor causes many chronic issues with your body, and working around hazardous materials is it’s own world of hell, sedentary lifestyle is one of, if not the largest, reason that obesity, and a million cardio thoracic problems have ballooned to crisis levels.
Also problems in the bones, and the muscles, due to them becoming atrophied.
