Under capitalism, a lot of the time, highly dangerous jobs are also highly paid. Kind of a balance that the individual decides to engage with. Same idea behind getting an advanced degree in STEM or law. I think of my job by example, I’m a power plant operator at a large combined cycle plant. No fucking shot I’d be doing this if the pay wasn’t good. I’m around explosive and deadly hot shit all day.
I agree with your sentiment but it’s absurd to tell OP that his job is “very safe”. Until you’ve seen what heavy industry is really like, I’d refrain from commenting on it. I’m an industrial electrician and I’ve worked in steel mills, foundries, factories, power plants, etc.
It can truly be the wild west out there. Operators have a tough job in often sketchy situations, heavy machinery, around nasty chemicals and fumes and just the dirtiest grime. Mills fucking suck for example. We’ve been working on the Oswego plant in upstate New York which is the largest supplier of aluminum for Ford. It burned down, twice. There was a giant ass hole in the roof from the fire and like 12 feet of water in the basement from all the fire departments spraying where all the electrical equipment is. Then when they were fixing shit, another fire happened from someone welding on the roof.
This is an extreme example, but it is insane how the world works sometimes. I was 22 working on a solar power plant out west and the maintenance guys told me everything was locked out and off. I do a dead check and find 1000v on the busbar from a row of solar panels on some shit I was just about to work on. “Oh yeah that disconnect box is broke, we don’t shut that one off” was the response.
Safety and regulation can only get you so far unfortunately. Safety is always #1 all these places say but you really gotta be on and alert and conscious of what’s going on around you at all times. Injuries can happen in an instant
I think there’s a difference between a job being dangerous and a job having statistically significant dangerous outcomes. What you seem to be describing is a job with many dangers, but you don’t provide data on if the job actually produces outcomes caused by a dangerous environment more than most jobs. Something like this provides evidence on what jobs are statistically dangerous in the US at least: https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-injuries/civilian-occupations-with-high-fatal-work-injury-rates.htm
When you’ve visited enough industrial plants and seen the wildly ranging safety standards and practices, the aggregated statistics just aren’t very interesting.
I’ve been to a plant, a Superfund site that supplies a material strategically necessary to the US, and which will thus never be closed - that released clouds of chlorine gas daily. Staff at the neighboring plant have to literally watch for yellow clouds and fuckin run when they see them.
Paper mills? Even just their “man lifts” (thankfully going the way of the dinosaur), something like a vertical conveyor belt where you stand on this narrow pad to rapidly ascend floors - hilariously dangerous.
Any kind of metal extraction and processing with strong acids, incidents do happen. Worst I personally observed (far from the worst I’ve heard of) I got called to remotely help assess a refining plant using lots of gross acids, after an earthquake caused a plant evacuation and an unknown cloud of mixed something started building above it.
Some of the high tech processes I’ve seen are truly chilling. Like, “no one in a 100 ft radius survives at all if this stuff gets released”.
I did that work for less than 10 years. Statistics are great, but they also hide nuance like it’s their job. Anyone who has done this kind of work understands the elevated danger, though it does vary a lot from place to place (really more industry to industry).
3x more fatalities than national average. No it’s not in the top ten most dangerous, thats not equivalent to not dangerous though.
Right, see that’s good data. That’s my only point. Not saying any specific job is or isn’t dangerous, I’m just saying the commenter seemed to be confusing “job that is around dangerous stuff” with “jobs that get people hurt often”.
The OP didn’t say they were in “heavy industry” they said they were in a specific job. A job I happen to know is safe.
Not sure why you’d make an unforced error and change his job to your job. Especially when I literally said your job was among the most dangerous in my reply.
He already replied to you saying his job is dangerous. He said he’s around hot and explosive shit all day. I’ve been in power plants and that’s the example I gave that some of them are not fucking safe. We built panels for this nuke plant and the guy was telling me you can’t touch some of the handrails because you’ll get shocked .
Really don’t care about how you feel about it because I’ve seen it with my eyes.
Weird hill to die on
Yeah, I tested the logical extreme with him further down and he confirmed that chainsaws (arguably the most risky equipment to use) are not dangerous tools because few people die yearly from them. He also stated you would have to try really hard to injure yourself with a modern chainsaw. I don’t think hes left his room in awhile or has any experience with anything outside of internet arguments. I make posts like this so I can try to learn from people with more/different information from me. That’s evidenced in my post/comment history. If this is how his logic/brain work there is clearly nothing worth trying to learn from him.
It’s all good man, stay safe out there.
His job is potentially dangerous, not statistically dangerous. It’s statistically very safe. We don’t call air travel less safe because you might die more often when there’s an accident…the analogy holds here.
It’s beside the point because the most dangerous jobs aren’t well paid under capitalism, and you misunderstand communism if you believe that all jobs pay the same.
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