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How many of those days and hours were spent inside an air conditioned room with a bathroom and, probably, a kitchen/cafeteria? I work in engineering for constr
by abduhl 7y ago
How many of those days and hours were spent inside an air conditioned room with a bathroom and, probably, a kitchen/cafeteria?
I work in engineering for construction - when we were building Bertha's rescue shaft in Seattle the crews worked 5 months straight drilling holes and placing concrete with two crews on 12 hour shifts with only July 4 and Memorial Day off. When we excavated the shaft and repaired the machine we switched to three 8s and ran for almost another year.
Rain or shine, hot or cold, day or night. We worked that job every day. Nobody left until we switched to 8s because guys wanted to work 10s on another job - that's just blue collar work. In fact, that's the type of blue collar work that guys want because the OT pays the bills so you're right about that. The management on the project? Worked 1.5x as many hours as the crew because they would normally cover a shift and a transition. Every one salaried. Nobody left.
What the tech industry complains about for working conditions makes me laugh.
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's quite the story! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_(tunnel_boring_machine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_(tunnel_boring_machine)
- anigbrowl 7y agothe OT pays the bills Another way to look at this is that people are underpaid just enough to get them to work longer, but the knock-on costs of that (impact on health etc.) won't manifest until later and will likely be borne by someone else rather than the current employer. This is equally true for bricklayers and coders. For context I also did many years of construction and manual work, I'd guess my life has been about 50-50 physical and brain work (of course they're not mutually exclusive). The above is an observation from experience rather than theory.
- fzeroracer 7y agoThis seems like essentially a race to the bottom to claim that 'you can't truly be burned out unless you did X terrible job'. For example, your complaints about working conditions would likely make my parents laugh, because they would spend weeks out at sea working essentially 24/7 as fishermen in order to bring home a large enough haul to make the trip worth it. Not to mention the time spent traveling to Alaska and being away from home for months at a time. Obviously blue collar work is going to be harder than white collar, but that doesn't change the fact that working conditions for each job can still be terrible relative to the type of work it's located in. It's the same for blue-collar work where not all blue-collar work is going to be equally difficult.