Comment by kixiQu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kixiQu | Hacker News Reader

My parents met when they were both working construction. My mom was a surveyor and a laborer at various times; she helped get my dad into the union (Philly) and he was a carpenter. My mom stopped it to raise me and my sibling; my dad did it until it entirely broke his body. (I would not be writing this as a college-educated adult if he hadn't had a union pension that kicked in on disability.)

I know precisely one person my age who's working construction and he knows he's got to get out before it does the same to him. If most of the people you know work office jobs you may not be familiar with just how routine and severe those "injuries" are that they mention. All the cultural factors are real too -- hoo BOY my mom has stories -- but you gotta look at this stuff through how physically destructive it is to the workers.

(I'm sure there's a health care angle too, of course -- so much of my parents' compensation went to those "Cadillac" health care plans that politicians don't understand the point of. It'd be interesting to compare Canada)

Here in Germany about 50% of high school graduates go into a traditional vocational program, many of which are crafts. Electrical work, the car industry, machinery, carpentry, woodwork and so forth.

My family (with me being the first exception) is all blue collar and I understand that construction is uniquely taxing physically but from my parents and people younger I've never heard horror stories about lost fingers or anything like that you're used to from very old people who work in trades. It's definitely possible to do these jobs safely and with good pay nowadays and safety regulations as well as better tools have aided a lot.

A lot of it I feel has to to with culture. If you have a guild system or something comparable that values the crafts and make sure payment and standards are met it's very different from letting people work themselves into the ground.

I've only heard the, you know, missing-finger classic table saw horror stories very indirectly, honestly. My parents both spoke of OSHA rules like they were the gospel of the earth below, and the union had the power to ruin the company's day if they weren't following them. Non-union work here is very, very different, though -- some stories aren't mine to repeat, but I'll note "Helpers, construction trades" here:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.t05.htm

Even on following-the-rules job sites, "safely" is always kind of relative; when lifting and carrying and repetitive motion can be the causes of disabling injuries, it gets really hard to define bright lines with which you can protect yourself over decades. To some extent, taking time and being careful are the guards you have, but ... any American workplace knows that having your employees exercise wide individual discretion to set an appropriate pace -- well, that doesn't sound like Maximizing Efficiency, does it? (Sorry, I did try to tone down the bitterness here.)

Actually, there's a specific gauge on that I'd be curious to compare against, even anecdotally, for how things differ there: how common are people getting hernias at work?

It happened to my father - lost his two right middle fingers on a table saw. I suppose this was before OSHA rules had wider-reaching impact, because he lost them in the late 60s (while working on construction for the NYC housing authority ... so it could have been union at that time, but I don't remember what he said.)

Table saws are no joke, even in the best of circumstances! There definitely is still risk even when you're managing that risk well. (And it doesn't matter how many videos of it I watch, that SawStop stuff still feels like a miracle every time you see a hot dog spared.)

Table saws are deceptively dangerous - because they’re so large and fixed they feel safer than they are.

It’s definitely one of the “think three times and then do it slow and safe” tools in the shop.

While the SawStop is definitely impressive, almost any modern table saw is safer than one from the 60's due to the standardization of riving knives. For those who don't know, it's the metal fin behind the saw blade, and it's thicker than the body of the blade but thinner than the teeth. It reduces the chances of wood binding on the saw blade (and resulting kickback) by a large amount. They're a required component by many countries and standards bodies.

Add in cheap 3d-printed push blocks, push sticks, and feather guides and almost no one is losing digits these days unless they're willfully ignoring safe practices or using the wrong tool for the job. Tracked saws and 3d printed router jigs have also added options when a piece would be awkward or unsafe to table saw.

Thanks for sharing this: I'd never even heard of riving knives. Wild to think of how many technological improvements like that have made the world safer/better without schmucks like me having any idea.

I worked in a job that employed lots of disabled blue collar workers.

It’s the joints: bad knees, bad backs.

It’s not like back in the day where you get missing fingers. That’s really rare.

But the steady grind of lifting, carrying, lifting, carrying, again and again destroys the joints.

That’s harder to regulate away.

Hauling materials breaks your body over time. I know from experience.

This is quite interesting to me, because I've been into lifting and body building at times in my life and the research was clear: within limits, this is very good for the human body. So I'm quite confident to say that there's nothing inherently bad about lifting, pushing, twisting, pulling, turning, and holding heavy things. Quite the opposite. So the question then becomes: is this about technique? Are these labourers lifting with their backs, for example? Are they just never taught to lift things correctly? Or is this about dangerous workplaces? Or is this about repetitive strain? Heavy lifting is good for the body, but maybe not 12 hours of the same heavy lifting.

IMHO, all of these can be relieved through workplace reform. In other words, manual labour doesn't have to result in a broken body. Labourers can be taught how to lift correctly. They can be given a safe environment; and they can be rotated to lots of different tasks to prevent RSI.

When you lift weights, you can choose a weight that’s appropriate to you. When it gets too heavy, you stop. When you’re finished, you rest for a day or two. When you feel a twinge, you easy up or take a rest day.

When you’re lifting heavy things for a job, you lift whatever needs to be lifted in whatever motion it needs, with incentives to do it quickly. If you’re tired, you lift it anyway. If you feel a twinge, you probably ignore it because it’s probably nothing. Then you do it again the next day regardless of whether you feel like it.

Some of that can be mitigated by workplace rules, but it needs pretty radical overstaffing or acceptance of considerably slower work, neither of which Capital is a big fan of.

Lifting, twisting, turning, etc heavy things isn’t intrinsically bad, but it is intrinsicallyr risky. In a gym environment you have the ability to control that risk.

As a lifter you have full control over how many reps you do, you have all the time in the world to make sure your form is good before lifting, you don’t need to move around while carrying that weight, and you’re lifting conveniently-shaped weights.

Also, even the most well-maintained mechanical device will eventually suffer from material fatigue when put under load for significant amounts of time. Our bodies are no different.

JFYI, here (Italy, possibly all EU, but I am not sure) the max weight of a sack of cement (or similar, gypsum, plaster etc.) is since quite a few years 25 kg, but it once was 50 kg.

A "sane" max limit is 30 kg for a "normal" worker in good shape, so the 25 kg makes a lot of sense.

There was a precise technique to lift the 50 kg sack and put it on your shoulder, one single, tiny mistake in the speed or in the amplitude of the movement and it was very, very likely you would strain your back.

In the old times it was rather common as an accident on building sites, and anyway even people that never made a mistake have had their backs ruined over the years.

The "main" study/manual on the matter is actually US originated, by NIOSH, dating to 1994, that has been recently updated:

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/94-110/default.html

not limited to construction only, it applies on whatever activities imply moving loads, particularly if in a repetitive manner.

In Germany you can still buy 40 kg sacks (but 25 kg seems the default?) but it always seemed very stupid to me. Rather move something half the weight twice than twice the weight once.

However if you are doing it professionally, why not have your underlings move twice the weight? Time is money and all that, besides, if you don’t do it, your competitors probably are so if you don’t want to go under, you’re going to have to do the same thing.

Because that's a shitty, unethical way to operate. Yes, the competitors are also

> So I'm quite confident to say that there's nothing inherently bad about lifting, pushing, twisting, pulling, turning, and holding heavy things. Quite the opposite.

Technically correct I guess? The thing is, in construction there is a lot less latitude for you to choose a) from where to lift b) where to put down c) how much you're going to lift d) how often.

> So the question then becomes: is this about technique? Are these labourers lifting with their backs, for example? Are they just never taught to lift things correctly?

rolls eyes

> Or is this about repetitive strain?

Mostly. In your gym lifting, do you do 300 reps a day? For five or six days per week? For 48 weeks of the year? For ten to forty years? I bet you have more rest days than that.

> is this about technique?

Technique is impossible to apply consistently in blue-collar jobs. You're not necessarily standing on a flat, stable, firm, grippy floor, lifting a stable, ideally-shaped, easily grasped, rigid, non-slippery mass straight up and down close to your torso. There are wind, rain, cold, heat, and much more to deal with.

> Labourers can be taught

This is broken thinking. For health and safety, tasks must be redesigned to fit humans, not the other way around.

Edited to add: humans get tired, get distracted, take shortcuts, hurry to get the job done, or simply make mistakes. Any task design that doesn't account for these and still keep people safe is faulty.

>Are they just never taught to lift things correctly?

Part of it is that you find yourself having to lift in awkward positions often while you're having to carry heavy materials through obstacle courses, up on ladders and down stairs in ways that you'll inevitably have to compromise optimal form all while the wage clock is ticking so you have to hurry. In weightlifting you're afforded proper time and place to practice good form. That's coming from a Carpenter for twenty years and a weightlifter for four. Carpentry and a vehicle wreck pretty much destroyed my back but weightlifting and what I've learned from it has helped restore it somewhat.

Interesting. I've often heard that athletes in even non-contact high school sports need to lift weights - to protect at-risk joints by strengthening the various muscles around them.

It would be extremely nice if mandatory weight training could greatly reduce the incidence of injuries and "wear out" in blue collar workers...

Besides all the other things people are saying about the difference between work and lifting in the gym have you spent much time with older power lifters? Almost uniformly they’ll have joint, neck and back issues.

The human body needs to run in a pretty thin zone of activity. Too little and you get the obesity issue, too much and if breaks. And that band is changing as you age.

If that physical activity is by choice and easily changed you can stay healthy a very long time, but that’s not how it is when it’s your job.

In addition to the inherent physical nature of the work, another problem is working for small businesses that fly under the radar of OSHA and other regulations. Also, family owned businesses don't have a "normal" career advancement process unless you belong to the family.

When people come to work on my house, I've noticed that everybody who is around my age (58) is hobbling and broken.

Oof, the flaky radar of regulatory agencies... I wonder if it's the same in other comparable countries -- not just OSHA, but all DOL enforcement broadly is just such a joke in the US that it seems reasonable to expect almost any random place might be doing better.

On the other hand the family sized ones do jobs that aren't economically viable for a large unionized one because of too much overhead. The difference between a large construction company and a small one remodeling your home can be in the five figures. I think it's not fair to say that a family one lacks career advancement, it's like saying that a small web development shop doesn't have the same career advancement opportunities as Microsoft. It doesn't mean that working for a small shop is a dead end job. In reality an experienced tradesman is always in high demand by larger firms or has the ability to be an independent contractor, regardless of where he started. In large cities a licensed plumber or electrician can make six figures and trying to get them to come out to your house can take weeks because they're so busy. The independent nature of the work makes it very resistant to national franchises, and different start ups have tried to make "uber-like" services for contracting tradesmen, Amazon has tried upselling "pro" installation services but nobody's been able to really centralize it yet.

> The difference between a large construction company and a small one remodeling your home can be in the five figures.

I work by myself, for myself, and I'm able to charge much less than most simply because I have almost no overhead and almost everything goes in my pocket. I don't need to pay for a building lease, employees, company vehicles, etc. But it'll take me a week to do what those other companies can do in a day.

I hope you experiment with raising your prices from time to time.

Indeed, I just recently raised them.

I've been fortunate in finding a remodeling contractor that hires people who know what they are doing and pays them minimum of $30/hr and is insured/licensed. So far most of them have done excellent work. Some are purely carpenters, some are mostly painters, some have multiple skills. I talk with them and most could work for large construction companies building hotels and apartments (lots of that going on here) but prefer working 40 hr weeks working on people's homes. The carpenter (now retired) did a bunch of work in my house and was amazing to watch.

Trades were not great for me. I felt like I was just waiting to get killed by a coworker constantly. For $25/hr CAD. Not a very good deal at all.

Apart from the risk imposed by working with totally careless and disengaged people in large machines, my body felt like garbage all the time. My elbow stopped working near the end and I couldn’t do simple things like open my car door. I learned to program as fast as my brain could accommodate. It was totally unsustainable.

Huh. My neighbor growing up was an electrician. By his 40's he struck out on his own with his own company. Made way more money than my family that was doing white collar office jobs.

Dude spent his 50's retired on some boat.

He is probably a businessman who started as an electrician

But did he make his money as an electrician or an entrepreneur and business owner?

Both. Good enough electrician to have a long customer list. Figured he could strike out on his own and hire his own crews.

Like a programmer working for a FAANG then starting their own consultancy.

My parents were fishermen and have close to the same story, only without the union safety net. Which went as well as you can imagine.

My parents constantly encouraged me and were happy to see me pursue a white collar path because they didn't want me to go through the same thing when I got older. A lot of the shortages is cultural: Parents steering their kids out of said path as much as possible, sexism/racism and so forth. But then there's also the pay issue where the pay doesn't match the labor intensity nor are there many safety nets unless you're part of a union.

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