When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder"
We never win, and sometimes accepting that is the right decision.
To not be loved is a simple mistake, to not love one another is a fatal mistake.
It all seems to grow from a Seed of Ignorance:; a complete lack of understanding of what someone else's job actually entails, coupled with the subjective measure of how difficult a thing is which is largely based on our own narrow limitations and experiences. It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector.
In my experience, it seems to apply to every sector out there. I got started in a different industry than what I'm active in now, and what you describe I have seen across any type of job I've held.
Might be smart in many instances to do cross training, and on the job perspective expanding, but at the end of the day: it's usually better to let the animous live...and the spice flow.
Company A(CA) had tons of open channels between sales, engineering and machining. Sakes reps had to spend time with the service dept every few months, helping with repairs and what not. One sales guy opted to do it more often because it helped him understand the products better, which helped him sell. Engineering and machining were constantly showing each other different things that could improve production. We barely needed management, leavjng them to focus on administrative crap nobody else wanted to do. It was quite wonderful and remarkably effective. I miss that job, actually.
Company B(CB) did the opposite. All departments, and I mean all had walls between them, both metaphorical and physical. Department heads were the only conduits and they were unreliable at moving info between depts, not to mention reluctant to work with each other. Things constantly had to be reworked, tons of money wasted on parts nobody could use, quality assurance was always an after-thought, etc. The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death. It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.
So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB? Both shops are the same size and offered very similar products and services. Those are just two of my examples, too. I've been with a handful of shops for a long time, and the latter is always a hellscape to work in.
> Company B(CB) did the opposite. [...] The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death.
> So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB?
Murphy's law says Company B. :-(
(Please, please tell us different!)
> It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.
YM AlterCation?
There are extreme cases, such as people dying and no one realising that their work is not being done, and that is rare, but a certain amount of slacking off, spending time of social media, etc. is not at all uncommon.
I mean, the statistics support the extraordinary amount of time spent on social media all throughout the day across all generations.
I wish there was a good term for it like we have "fundamental attribution error" for that other pernicious cognitive fallacy.
The core mistake is that believing that all we know about something is equivalent to all there is to know about something. So if you don't know anything about welding, you assume it must be brain-dead simple because your knowledge of it is so tiny. If you don't know anything about engineering, you assume it's just pushing buttons.
It's not just about people's jobs, either. It shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.
Conversely “you’re not really working” comes from blue collar workers.
Both sentences are the same and they are usually used by assholes from one or the other side that either feel attacked or feel superior.
There is no intrinsic value in any of those statements besides what it is saying about person using it - that person is an asshole.
Edit: it's also telling from a status standpoint that you characterized the blue collar comment as "insulting upwards." It would probably go a long way to avoiding those types of comments in the first place if people didn't implicitly think blue collar work is "below" white collar work.
Even if it is technically true - why would anyone actually say that to someone?
I think that especially calling white collars out as not doing real work is often lovingly. It can be said by assholes, but the language around physical labour is often “tough love”. I’m not sure calling blue collar workers unfulfilled is very often lovingly though, so I think most people who do that are assholes.
What is interesting in the debate to me, is that I see a lot of IT work as blue collar work. Not all of it, but a lot of what we do is basically trade-skill related similar to how plumbing is. It’s just no physical. Over all though, I think it’s best to spend very little time on people who actually mean it hatefully when they call you X. Who cares what assholes think?
Society has loads of edge cases like this.
I broke my arm a few years back, went to hospital, and a surgeon put some titanium plates and screws in. The orthopaedic surgeon spends a lot of the day standing, they repeat similar work every day with minor variations, they can't work remotely, they're exposed to hazardous chemicals, they have face-to-face interactions with customers, they earn money by working rather than from investments or inheritance, they're union members, they get paid overtime, they wear blue employer-issued workwear, many do shift work, and they literally put in screws for a living.
And yet nobody would say surgeons are blue collar workers.
Maybe because of the $500k salaries, or the air-conditioned hospitals they work in, or because their status is equivalent to doctors who are pretty much the definition of upper-middle-class tie-wearing knowledge workers.
Very few surgeons are union members. They frequently work for outside groups and are paid per procedure. The ones that do work for the hospital on salary don’t get overtime.
>status is equivalent to doctors
They are doctors. Both in title and in function. Most surgeons only operate a couple days a week. The rest of their time they see patients in clinic, and an outside observer couldn’t tell the difference between their work environment and a primary care physician’s.
You are onto something though. My wife is an ER doctor and her job is very similar to blue collar service jobs (if you consider service jobs blue collar).
She doesn’t make her own schedule. She works insane shifts (one day she could work 7a-4p, the next 10p-7a). She interacts with patients directly all day.
The pay is a lot better, but the hours are worse than any retail job I’ve ever heard of, and you can’t call in sick. Her coworker was sick and could barely get out of bed, but she came in early to have a nurse give her an IV so she could power through her shift—that kind of thing is very common.
Plus you have the ultimate responsibility for every patient that comes through the door. You have to make sure you don’t miss anything serious every time—while at the same time, making sure that you don’t spend too much time with each patient. And the ER you’re working in is full because the floor is too full to admit new patients but the ER can’t just shut the door, so patients are boarding in the halls.
Oh and if you mess up, you can literally lose your house when a jury awards someone more than your malpractice insurance will cover.
They're not a union member the same way a teacher, police officer, or steam fitter is but they're not as far removed as your typical programmer, for example.
Powerful unions
The vast majority of doctors aren’t even members of the AMA.
As for medical specialty boards, getting board certified is much more like an engineer passing the PE exam than joining a union.
Also collective bargaining with your employer is the primary benefit of joining a union, and the primary purpose of joining a union. Without that function a union would be unrecognizable to the average union member.
And currently the AMA’s position is that congress should fund more resident slots which is the limiting factor for the number of doctors.
>precisely why doctors and lawyers get paid so much
I don’t know that regulation is precisely why. It surely contributes, but doesn’t explain all of it.
Carpenters are very rarely regulated, HVAC technicians usually are. The training required is similar. The average salary difference is less than $10k a year.
Doctor’s (and lawyer’s) salaries vary drastically by specialty, and number of doctors in a specialty doesn’t explain all or even most of the pay disparity.
There are far fewer pediatric emergency medical physicians than GI docs, but GI docs make way more money. The extra income has nothing to do with restricted supply, it’s a side effect of the way insurers pay (by procedure and GI does way more procedures).
"Exhausting work," lol.
The only people who say nonsense like this are the people who've never done manual labor for a living. I've done both and there's just no comparison of exhaustion levels.
I live on a horse farm. My day starts and ends with heavy manual labor working around animals that can kill me in an instant if they're in a bad mood or I have the misfortune to get in the middle of a beef between two of them. Most of yesterday, the temperature was in the single digits Fahrenheit with wind gusts to 50mph.
I'm also a programmer. There are some days I couldn't tell you which of the two jobs is the more exhausting.
I've also done both and each can leave me profoundly exhausted in very different ways. Neither flavor of exhaustion is worse than the other, just different.
When someone compares programing to manual labor implying that programming is more tiring or at least as tiring, yes, absolutely, 100%, it's incredibly difficult for me to respond with empathy. Impossible, even. It's clear that person has had an incredibly sheltered life.
Thanks for asking? I guess???
My experience as someone who needs to do both is that often "game recognizes game", so great office workers will appreciate great blue collar workers and vice versa — if given the chance.
Every blue collar worker had situations where they had to wait because some lazy office bum that had to give them paperwork would rather chat with their collegues than do their job.
And every white collar worker had situation where a craftsperson communicated in single word fragments, went off and was seen to smoke cigarettes for half the time only to write them down as work hours while leaving things broken afterwards.
The only thing capable blue/white collar workers hate more than that is uncapable people on their own side.
I would suggest putting in the time to find a different definition of "win" for your life, rather than accepting it.
Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me, but I guess that's beyond the topic.
Ironically, the people who say "you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned" and "you have no empathy" have no empathy or consideration for the people they want to take from.
I feel like that extrapolating a lot from someone who just emotionally doesn't feel well.
> the fact that someone earns a low wage is because they have chosen not to improve themselves
I don't think you understand how poverty works (in most countries at least). Have you ever lived close to the poverty line and/or earned below minimum wage?
> you're selfish and greedy if you don't give me the money you earned [...] the people they want to take from
No one says this, but at least that you wrote this makes it clear that you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.
Yes. I grew up in poverty in an area far from any big cities in the '70s and '80s. We only had eggs and meat because we raised chickens and rabbits. Half my calories during the summer months came from the garden.
>No one says this, but at least that you wrote this makes it clear that you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.
I paraphrased. What was actually said was "I hate living in a country where everyone is greedy and don't want to support the poor and homeless."
> you don't want to engage in a discussion in good faith.
Your comment ended in a way that demonstrated no interest in a good faith discussion. Preemptively telling the people who disagree with you that they have no empathy is a sure-fire way to guarantee that tone of response.
E: Both your comments so far in this subthread are predicated on invalidating the opinions of other because you assert they don't have the right life experiences to know how it is.
Tell us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase withnout telling us you haven't grown out of your teenage Ayn Rand-fan Libertarian phase.
> Ironically enough, that you cannot see past the emotional language and describe the quote as "alienating me" also demonstrate an lack of empathy for me
I wouldn't be surprised if I actually have below-average empathy, but unfortunately for you, people like us still get to vote, and shame isn't a great way to get support on controversial issues. Anyways, your choice in language has real utility, so it's not really a matter of whether or not I'm empathetic. I support welfare as a social safety net, but not welfare solely for the sake of redistribution of wealth. If the political camp that is advocating for welfare is using language that suggests the second purpose of welfare, then I'm less inclined to support them.
> When you do blue collar you get "you should've studied harder"
Do you really though? I know there's a lingering sentiment from somewhere, but at the same time... I don't recognise this sentiment at all, neither from personal experience nor anecdotal from diverse / random people on the internet in 2024.
On the other side of things, because I still do a lot of that sort of "trade work" to help out friends since it's my background, I get a lot of "how do you know how to do all this, aren't you glad you went to school and don't have to do this every day, have you tried to convince your family to go back to school?" (and of course, the republicans are bad / dumb undertones, even present in the linked article)
People will always find something to beat you over the head with. The most important thing is not to let them infect you with their negativity.
Did he really say that? Farmers are the original WFH-ers.
You never win everything simultaneously, yes.