Yes, and this is something that is routinely overlooked. Work identities run deep, and they are not easily changed.
Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.
Truck driver to nurse is special kind of issue, because nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity. But they will take jobs that are not that much feminine.
And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.
Without throwing the gender stuff into it... There are plenty of occupations I have no interest in and can't picture myself ever doing. People spend their childhood and young adulthood figuring out what they are good at and what they enjoy, and you can't expect them to suddenly move to something completely different.
I'm not going to hold back my description of reality out of fear that it's somehow magically shaping it. Stating most nurses are female is the mildest observation possible, and doesn't sneak in any opinion whether that's good or bad, unlike your comment.
The profession is in reality overwhelmingly female, and it is associated with women in basically the entire world. Even from a linguistic perspective, the origins of the English word is gendered (the association with wet nurses is unmistakably feminine), and similar phenomenon happen in other languages. It's no longer considered the polite word to use, but if you read moderately old Japanese texts you'll find nurses referred to as "kangohu," no longer preferred because the "hu" part specifically means "woman." I'm sure if we did a survey of more world languages we'd find other hints. Even high-minded economic writing will describe it as "pink-collar" work. You could quite sensibly argue that it should be otherwise but the world is not as we might wish it were.
OP did not say anything about skilled workers who make things with their hands. You are describing an artisan or craftsman, or at the very least a tradesman.
The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.
That person would have been a skilled laborer like a blacksmith a few generations ago. I'm sure many of those people felt the same way when factories started to produce what they had spent a lifetime learning to make.
Now that is happening to many kinds of knowledge workers. Assembly lines mechanized the work of artisans. LLMs are in the process of mechanizing knowledge and creative work, of certain kinds.
I’m not sure people working on an assembly line in a factory is defining themselves as their work task. Someone working in a factory mounting IPhone screens probably don’t make their job their identity the same way a designer, developer, author does.
(Of course there are manual jobs that people have as their identity.)
One tiny nanoscopic nitpick, because i agree with you mostly, programming is often creating wider things (abstractions, frameworks). I think it hits a different part compared to most jobs. Maybe... i'm not sure, but that's how i feel compared to other manual occupations that i loved too.
The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here.
However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.
It's also reflective of the author living in a very small bubble. It's quite a shame that chose to include that as I think the article is otherwise relevant and pertinent, but it colors the whole thing.
Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.