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.
>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.
I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.
For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.
> when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand
I don't think anyone here is unaware of this, it's more that maybe, purely relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes...
No?? I'm sorry but that's an insane comparison. We live in countries that have laws. Those laws are what applies the "law" of supply and demand to wages. We could alternatively have laws that say all human labor is paid equally per hour worked, or have a master table of types of work to monetary amounts, or some complex formula that takes various measurable factors into account.
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
I read a book called "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" by Barbara Demick, about North Koreans in the 1990s that escaped into China and told their story. One of the interesting parts of it is about the planned economy, and all the control the government exerts over the economy in NK.
There was a massive famine I didn't know about in the mid-to-late 1990s in NK, and millions died. During this period, an underground capitalism took over, where people were producing food in various ways, often grown in their own gardens, and then buying and selling from each other, with barter rates / prices determined by availability.
While I agree with you that countries can make rules that fix prices (or do whatever they want), there is an underlying set of mechanisms to supply and demand that are not derived from law, but logic. If I have 5 cupcakes, and there are 100 people that want them, unless someone points a gun at me and says "Sell them each for 5 cents" (while the 100 people all fight over who gets to pay), the natural incentive structure would essentially be an auction to figure out who is willing to pay the most, and then sell it to them. That's not some legal theory or set of laws, but rather the human condition.
Of course, it doesn't play out this way in reality. In reality, it all comes down to power, and those with power take whatever they want, but my point here is that supply and demand exist outside of a legal structure, and if there's only one electrician, and there's enough work for 10 electricians, that one electrician can server the richest 1/10 of those in need (and charge accordingly to select that 1/10), and it is rational to do so independent of any laws made. So much so, in fact, that laws are advisory, but the fundamental incentives are inherent.
This is why I like incentives more than rules: they're less brittle.
There are many inherent incentives that we correct for with laws. The incentive for people to shoplift is high, but we counter it with the threat of fines or jail. Similarly, the incentive is to raise prices / undercut wages / do arbitrage... and we can counter that with similar punishments.
I'm not saying I have the magic formula for how to codify such crimes and what punishment would be appropriate, but it took us hundreds of years to figure out how to effectively deal with even very basic crimes (and some countries still struggle with those).
Why does a kid in kindergarten that hoards all the crayons for himself get told off, but buying all the masks during a pandemic to sell at an insane profit was considered valid economic activity? We have arbitrarily decided that various tiers of "being an asshole" are somewhere between ssocially unacceptable and criminal, but if you're making money, being an asshole is fine. We can change that.
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.
timr · · focus · HN ↗
I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.
For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think anyone here is unaware of this, it's more that maybe, purely relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes...
wanderlust123 · · focus · HN ↗
It would be akin to saying its unfair humans can’t fly due to gravity
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
There was a massive famine I didn't know about in the mid-to-late 1990s in NK, and millions died. During this period, an underground capitalism took over, where people were producing food in various ways, often grown in their own gardens, and then buying and selling from each other, with barter rates / prices determined by availability.
While I agree with you that countries can make rules that fix prices (or do whatever they want), there is an underlying set of mechanisms to supply and demand that are not derived from law, but logic. If I have 5 cupcakes, and there are 100 people that want them, unless someone points a gun at me and says "Sell them each for 5 cents" (while the 100 people all fight over who gets to pay), the natural incentive structure would essentially be an auction to figure out who is willing to pay the most, and then sell it to them. That's not some legal theory or set of laws, but rather the human condition.
Of course, it doesn't play out this way in reality. In reality, it all comes down to power, and those with power take whatever they want, but my point here is that supply and demand exist outside of a legal structure, and if there's only one electrician, and there's enough work for 10 electricians, that one electrician can server the richest 1/10 of those in need (and charge accordingly to select that 1/10), and it is rational to do so independent of any laws made. So much so, in fact, that laws are advisory, but the fundamental incentives are inherent.
This is why I like incentives more than rules: they're less brittle.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not saying I have the magic formula for how to codify such crimes and what punishment would be appropriate, but it took us hundreds of years to figure out how to effectively deal with even very basic crimes (and some countries still struggle with those).
Why does a kid in kindergarten that hoards all the crayons for himself get told off, but buying all the masks during a pandemic to sell at an insane profit was considered valid economic activity? We have arbitrarily decided that various tiers of "being an asshole" are somewhere between ssocially unacceptable and criminal, but if you're making money, being an asshole is fine. We can change that.