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
This whole discussion is about the fact that it isn't paid well but it should be paid well.
But yeah, if "as far as you're concerned", what defines value is only the price under an unconstrained suppy-demand system, then this discussion won't go anywhere.
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
wanderlust123 · · focus · HN ↗
As far as I am concerned unskilled labour always has a lower value than skilled labour due to supply and demand.
Layering on laws and regulations does not change that.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
But yeah, if "as far as you're concerned", what defines value is only the price under an unconstrained suppy-demand system, then this discussion won't go anywhere.