Disconnected from how things work, America laughs at labor

"DCCARGEEK" (dccargeek) 09/11/2013 at 17:15 • Filed to: Society, Working Class

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Earlier today many of us got into a discussion about jobs, America’s youth and education as part of a discussion on Patrick George’s post about the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

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That discussion reminded me of recent testimony given by Mike Rowe to a Senate panel.

In the testimony Rowe says America is so disconnected by how things work that they look down on the people who do understand how those things work and make a living building and fixing those things .

People hand over their keys to a mechanic and play Angry Birds until it’s finished.

Sure, things are more complicated today, but I agree with Rowe here; fewer people care or are curious about how things work and even fewer care less about how to fix them.

Rowe goes on to say that society has shamed the very notion of technical skills and blue collar labor to the point people just don’t want to learn the skills any longer. While that may be hard for many car enthusiasts to understand, I’m sure we all have friends that if presented with a tool of any sort they’d be utterly clueless what to do with it.

This hearing was held over two years ago. If you have a chance, sit down and take the time to watch it.

It’s an interesting take on America’s perspective of labor.

GhostZ > DCCARGEEK 09/11/2013 at 17:49

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Not sure if you're the one I had the oppo convo with a few weeks back, but I have a theory on this.

Consider the 'inventor' who, back in late 1800s or early 1900s was considered crazy and worthless. It was the capitalists, resource controllers, and laborers who were respected and loved because that was what was most desirable. A single inventor could only hope his device was bought up by a major company and he was given a job to create it.

Now, that role of reverence that was held by the laborer, has passed on to the inventor. Check Venture Capital numbers as the years have gone by and you can very quickly see that big money and national interest is focused not on learning to build, but learning to build the builders. And that is the natural progression of the world.

The thing is, those plumbers, construction workers, and 'hands on' type of people should use their skills to find ways to not just do a job like a machine, but improve it and do it better than anyone else. More importantly, do it in a way that is completely different and better than it was. Just like how the hunter who was a master craftsman at taking down animals with his bare hands was laughed at by the first guy to pick up a spear.

But despite that, he is dead on . Not because laborers are reverent and necessary always, but because we are moving faster than we can control.

Or, if I could put it all in one sentence: Technology is moving faster than generational labor can keep up with .

Which is why it is a 'skills gap' .

For once, the changes in technology is making certain labor outdated at a faster rate than it takes for people to learn new jobs. So people are skipping over important jobs that are needed now, and going straight to jobs that will be in demand in 25, 30 years. This is part of the higher education bubble, and its a serious problem.

You can't say "we will always need plumbers". Because eventually, maybe we won't. The problem is that instead of slowly trickling off the number of plumbers as new technology fills that gap, making a smooth transition, technology has progressed so fast that incoming labor jumps past "plumbing" as a job all together and it starts shrinking way faster than new inventions can fill the gap.

DCCARGEEK > GhostZ 09/11/2013 at 17:56

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Would you recommend then that labor as a profession be somehow combined with innovation in a way that marries the two for the singular goal of progressing something more than a repair-man-in-waiting? If so, what would that be?

I'm curious how much innovation is speed limited based on the potential ROI of a VC upfront? Lets use toilets for example, is there a need or demand for a revolutionary toilet? If there is, VCs would pour money into startups to perform endless R&D into the next big thing in The John. But since there isn't a demand for that from a profit perspective, it's up to labor to innovate while repairing.

I'm following most of what you're saying and yes, I think you and I have had discussions that made most people skip right over in the infamous TL:DR fashion.

GhostZ > DCCARGEEK 09/11/2013 at 18:36

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There is a difference between demand and interest. Contrary to what Gregory Mankiw and his all-singing all-dancing crap of an economics book will tell you, demand doesn't exist before a product, it is created by a product.

Since toilets have been broken, there have been a demand for self-fixing/plunging toilets. This is more or less 'interest'. People want them, they know that if they were to exist, they would sell well. The question is whether or not demand can be created for a toilet with XXX properties and meet XXX overall cost.

It's a question of risk. What is the risk, and what is the reward, that a toilet with XXX (or XXX+1) properties at XXX cost can be created and delivered with in XXX amount of time and create (and meet) XXX amount of demand. Fact is, the quality of a product is one tiny factor in how successful it will become. It has much more to do with the stability of the business, the network of interested parties and the adaptive capability of the company.

So technology is progressing faster than ideas can be feasibly built, tested, and marketed. A lot of people who would otherwise be plumbing are now supporting industries (particularly universities) trying to run down all of the other things people "demand" that have less risk associated with them, or in other words, we're moving down a list of things that are more likely to be created and successful, and more stuff keeps being added at a faster rate. Unfortunately, the mythical self-repairing toilet is pretty low on that list.

GhostZ > DCCARGEEK 09/11/2013 at 18:49

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Oh, also to answer you more directly, labor is inherently tied to innovation. Because labor is, ultimately "a human spending time and energy to do work". In the physics sense of the word work. This means that labor is, at its most necessary level "anything that can only be done by a human being." Not necessarily can be done by "any" or "every" human, but definitely something that cannot be done by a substitute.

You may say that some jobs, like plumbing, could be done without a person, but there's also the level of adaptability and accuracy of the job. The demands of a plumber isn't to fix leaks, it's to find out why leaks happen and adaptively repair them. That level of thinking is what makes it so much more complex. Innovation is separating what humans are necessary for, and what they are useful for, and then opening up new areas where they are necessary and closing off areas where they are no longer useful.

beltedradial > GhostZ 09/12/2013 at 02:34

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I would argue that although labour is "inherently tied to innovation", that innovation is often inaccessible for other operators, unless said labourer shares his/her experience with others.

Often, within a workforce, there is a go-to guy or girl whom knows everything about the "XYZ Widget". That widget may remain broken until the specialist is available to fix it. Modern day maintenance planners use these specialists to develop repair plans which are then recorded. In the maintenance planning field, this is called a "Secondary Standard Job".

The end result is that as the specialist (let's call her Sam) retires and the "Secondary Standard Job" becomes a legacy task, new technicians no longer need to work out whether tab A goes into slot B or C. They just refer to Sam's standard job.

The maintenance planner likes it that way because they know it takes exactly 30 minutes to do Sam's job. That's how much time the technician gets to do the job.

So.... modern technical maintenance planning provides a hyper efficient method of resource management which allows an organisation to do more jobs per hour because they know the resources and spares impact associated with each planned job.

Technicians never develop their troubleshooting capabilities because 1. they don't need to, and 2. they don't have enough time to think about it.

This, of course, is limited to large organisations whom can afford to have a site or regional maintenance planner. Those are also exactly the types of organisations which become efficient enough to be able to buy out the less efficient (and therefore more expensive) small time operators.