Comment by mbgerring
11 days ago
People are part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers because there aren’t other jobs available, and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead.
There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts to a second job as a creative producer and art fabricator, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I need a day job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to pay the bills, I’d choose that over a full time job with a heavy mental load.
It’s easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like, seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders and also tons of people in line. It’s an assembly line. Different technical skills, but similar structure and pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.
tl;dr I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
>and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
Possibly. But they can't change the attitudes that created them from childhood up. The barista that complains on r/antiwork that their manager is a douche and that they're taking another mental health day because standing upright is too challenging for an hour at a stretch isn't going to like mandatory overtime spot welding or manning the torque wrench. Can they be taught to do it? Yeh, probably, theoretically at least. Supposing they don't get out because they'd rather be scrolling on a phone.
I can foresee this, it's not prophecy... just common sense. But I suppose other people need to run the experiment and see the results for themselves.
Out of high school, I must have worked 4 or 5 factory jobs (even in the early 1990s that was drying up), and so I have some idea what this is like. It's not a long-form media article for me. I don't think it's menial. When I use that word, I'm talking about the person at the cash register at Dollar Tree, or the job where you scrub the toilets at Wendy's.
>I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce,
Maybe. But I'm not understating its size, or the demographic projections that say it's shrinking quickly.
>and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
They'd be great. But you can't just make a magic wand and have them appear, and if you could you'd never fill the positions.