hard jobs

I heard a woman talking on the radio the other day, and what she said made me angry enough that it's been bouncing around my head for a few days.

She was talking about classes and taxation, and to paraphrase, said:

"Those office workers are always complaining about how hard their jobs are. If you want to really see a hard job, try scrubbing toilets for 12 hours a day. That's a hard job."

Now, this may offend the political sensibilities of my liberal friends, but this is complete bullshit. And I hear statements like this all the time.

Scrubbing toilets isn't hard. Flipping burgers isn't hard. Tedious, yes. Tiring, yes. Maybe a shitty job all around, yes. But it's not hard. Anyone can do it, with no training, very little in the way of having to exercise responsibility, decision making, or problem solving.

One way to find out if a job is harder than another is to take any two people, and have them switch jobs. Which of them is able to do the other person's job? Or, in some cases, which of them is able to learn to do the job faster? Setting aside questions of individual intelligence, that will teach you pretty quickly which job is harder.

People don't like to think about the fact that the capitalist system extends pretty cleanly into the job market, like it does with the goods that we buy, and that your salary is basically a reflection of your job difficulty. If you make $8/hr, your job probably isn't hard. And the thing is, you KNOW this. Because you probably hate your job, and the thing keeping you from switching to a job that pays more is that it's more difficult.

And it's just another symptom of the fact that no one defends the talent class in this country that people can say something like that and no one objects. You're speaking into a microphone that someone with a hard job designed. You're driving a car that someone with a hard job dreamed up and made a reality. But fuck em, they make a decent salary, so they're the prissy wealthy elite. It's so convenient to take these people for granted, because they won't object.

These so-called elite will agree with bullshit statements like this at parties, or on the radio, because they feel guilty for their success. It's oh so enlightened and popular for those who have success to be self-deprecating and accept the slurs about the ease of their lives.

But what it is really is condescension. Instead of telling people that the way to get out of their situation is further education or initiative, they just pretend that the jobs are really hard and noble, while internally not believing a word of it. Instead of encouraging them to do more, they inflate what they're currently doing. It's insulting to the people with difficult jobs to belittle them, and it's insulting to people with menial jobs to lie to them.