The idea that skilled people who work with their hands don't identify with their work is laughable.
Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.
And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.
In your head maybe?
In the US, 87.3% of nurses are female and 92.3% of truckers are male.
A “computer” used to be a job mostly done by female. Now it’s the opposite.
How do you mean? Trucking doesn’t mostly attract men and gp made it up?
The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.
Now that is happening to many kinds of knowledge workers. Assembly lines mechanized the work of artisans. LLMs are in the process of mechanizing knowledge and creative work, of certain kinds.
(Of course there are manual jobs that people have as their identity.)
However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.