I've worked a variety of manufacturing jobs; from medical manufacturing of catheters the size of fishing lines with three inner diamters, running 5 story oven stack extrusion lines, laser etching tooth insert threading, and suface coating PTFE into sheet material for military radar and industrial applications, to grunt work factory assembly lines making the rubber gun butts for Ruger.
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
> One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
That standard rejoinder is completely dismissive of how the capital owner came to be in the position of owning capital in the first place. That capital owner - or his ancestor - either worked exceptionally hard or took exceptional risks to get into that position.
"Or his ancestor"? What are we, an aristocracy? Personally I don't think there should be any inherited wealth beyond a few million dollars but that's another story. Luckily, this hasn't been a big problem yet. The heirs tend to be very bad at maintaining or building their inherited wealth. Cornelius Vanderbilt II is an obvious exception.
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
I feel like James Cameron has never tried anything safe. He was a truck driver early on. Some dentists took a risk and financed a truck driver to make a movie.
sans_souse · · focus · HN ↗
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
enoint · · focus · HN ↗