[drewcoo]

Yet frankly, what most of us do is more like plumbing than art. In that we're just fitting systems together and in that it's actual skilled labor and in that we're seen by everyone else as the ones willing to do the shitty work.

Management puts up with us and they pay us because even though they think they can do our work, they wouldn't want to.

Plumbers are licensed and unionized, two possible solutions to the problems posed in this thread.