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So there's a crash on the freeway, and someone needs to direct traffic. Yeah, I could probably do that, if I needed to. I even would, if I thought it needed doing, until actual authorities showed up. But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power. You want a professional doing that, because it's much more likely to work, and much less likely to have negative consequences. So having me "render assistance" is not likely to be either welcome or useful. In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more likely to get killed than to do much good. So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed. No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that, no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having to work out in the heat. And none of that takes anything away from my initial point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job. Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical farm. If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction is that we ought to pay people better who have to work outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people. |
Just as you went from unskilled in your domain to skilled in your domain, so could you theoretically go from unskilled in construction to skilled in construction. I know you don't want to become an expert in construction, but how much of that want is based in the fact that in the current build of society, the only way to become a construction expert is to accept years of low pay in terrible conditions with awful coworkers in 100-degree-heat? Don't you think that somehow, using the combined man- and brain-power of the billions of people alive, we could form some kind of society where you might be able to learn and perform some construction without needing to accept the complete sacrifice of your quality of life to do it?
The problem with "paying people better to work outside" is that the entire concept of paying people to do anything, ie rewarding people with money, require that the most unpleasant jobs be done by people who must choose between the job and starvation/exposure or violence (serfs or slaves). That's why the easiest, most brutal jobs are always done by the lowest-IQ immigrants. If you were to pay them more, per your suggestion, the price of the reward of their labor goes up (berries go from $6/carton to $38/carton), the demand for the reward of their labor goes down, and they get laid off and are back to having no way to secure food, shelter, and medical care. (There are some exceptions to this rule; construction workers in the US are usually decently-compensated, but the US is an anomaly because we subsist based on the efforts of serfs and slaves in Asia, who mine and refine our rare earth minerals, assemble our tech, etc.)