Worst job ever?

Toll booth attendants work out of the weather. They can sit down (on stools). Their work is not physically difficult. They do not work under direct supervision of a boss and are not driven by an assembly line. They have little contact with their “customers,” who are not generally hostile. They can listen to the radio. They are generally well-paid for unskilled work.

Froomkin is the usual clueless middle-class guy who can’t even begin to imagine what work is like for most of the people who do it.

Charles Bukowski, who did a lot of crappy work before he got work with the post office, was a connoisseur of bad jobs. In one story he describes piece-workers at long, ill-lit tables who are breaking crabs with hammers and pulling the meat out, over and over, at break-neck speed. He says that it appears they are pulling their own guts out. In another, he describes the work of the men who put up the advertising placards in New York subway cars. They work all night with their hands high over their heads, running through the dark cars as fast as they can, and from car to car on dangerous elevated tracks, with fifty pounds of cardboard slung over their backs.

For bad jobs, you have a combination of some or all of the following: exhausting repetitive motion; piece-work pay or an assembly-line-driven pace; extreme physical discomfort (rain, cold, heat, confined space); physical danger; stink, slime, or muck; and arbitary, cruel bosses.

People like us, sitting at our computers in our comfortable chairs, don’t have a clue what a truly bad job is like.

On what grounds is “toll booth attendant” a bad job? I’m with bloix; almost any agricultural job is worse, as are many factory jobs.

Press secretary for the Bush administration. Even I have some principles.

Chicken Processor

Hands down.

Actually, the mere idea that someone intelligent could think that Toll Booth Operator was among the shittiest jobs has put me in an alternatingly sad and foul mood.

It’ll never happen, but one of the best ideas ever put forth by an American is the idea of compulsory, totally shitty, totally degrading, military-style hard labor for all Americans: http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

We shouldn’t underestimate how much a good job is determined on a scale of soul suckingness. I think toll booth person must rank very high on this scale.

I have had dirty, hard, and repetitive physical jobs. I have had outside jobs were there was no escape from whatever weather you happened to get that day. I did not ever think I could be that cold and survive. I even had a job where I started the day by jumping out of a helicopter into a swamp and sinking in down to my chest (actually that was pretty cool).

But working in a suit and tie every day as a low level bureaucrat moving meaningless numbers from one column to the next was certainly one of the least rewarding jobs I have ever had. It looked good on paper and was certainly more comfortable, but it was worse than the others.

Of course one summer break I got a pitiful offer to throw blocks of cement into a tumbler, remove the blocks, and restack them on a piece-work pay basis. That would have been worse…you should have seen the crew….

I am guessing that the meat processing jobs are in fact the worst on all the criteria noted so far.

Actually, they’re Toll Booth Attendants since they don’t operate much of anything, and (in Illinois, anyway) they’re plum jobs, passed out to the relatives of political hacks. They clamor for the opportunity to stick a rubber-gloved hand clutching a bunch of pennies at you.

By the way, toll roads (like anything that deals in small amounts of cash with many transactions are a big money laundry for the mob and crooked pols.

rvman,

You want to know something scary? In the part of Kentucky where my family lives, working in the chicken processing plant is one of the good jobs.

I’d say piecework ag work is probably the worst job. Roofing is pretty bad (I’ve done a good bit of it); with black shingles in the summer, you end up with 1st-degree burns all over your hands and forearms..

Worst job ever? Draft horse at Manor Farm.

Martin-

Your dad is a stud. I have no idea what my dad’s proudest moment was, but I do know the most eye-opening moment I had of his work. He was a carpenter/carpet-layer, and when I was thirteen I was helping him on a job and, while building some stairs, he slipped and nailed his hand to the most recently-built step with the nail gun. He turned to me, cigarette in his mouth, and yelled, “Get me a hammer!” Reaching into my work bucket, I handed him a hammer–and he clawed his hand up from the step. Then he yelled, with cigarette still dancing on his lip as he turned his hand over and pounded out the nail, “Get me some duct tape!” And then we went back to work…

Meanwhile: TOLL BOOTH OPERATOR??!!!

How about changing diapers in a nursing home?

I think the meat/fish/poultry processing and many outside construction jobs (working a jackhammer on a highway in the summer say?) has to be worse than tollbooth attendant, but I think tollbooth attendant would be pretty miserable — repetitive, no substantial personal interaction, cramped space, and if the booth is does not have AC, then it is pretty miserable in the summer and probably not too warm in the winter, and the car fumes must suck. Sure, you have a radio, but the ambient road noise is going to make listening to anything but talk radio (even NPR has lame shows [e.g., Dick Gordon’s _The Story_ WTF?]) difficult, and anyone whose sat on a stool for long knows that is not too comfortable.

Also, remember that danger and physical risk was not one of the criteria.

I would add another candidate — coding for social science research on a topic that you have no interest in. Talk about dreary.

Walt, I believe that’s spelled “366 SUXXOR.”

Supermarket checker–repetitious, physically confining, boring, nothing to show at the end of the day and constant public contact: nowhere to hide. Data-entry operator: repetitious, physically confining, boring and even worse than scanning groceries because you can’t even think about other things, nothing to show, and closely supervised: very keystroke monitored. Telephone order taker: physically confining (you sit in a carrel all day), boring, closely supervised (supervisors monitor calls), nothing to show for your work and constant public contact.

Almost all pink-collar jobs are awful because most involve either endless repetition, physical constraint, close supervision, nothing to show at the end of the day, constant people contact or all of the above. Ironically, the only pink-collar job that doesn’t have any of these characteristics is housework: the tasks are varied, it’s physical work where you get to move around a lot, it’s strenuous and you can get dirty, no people contact and it produces a visible result of which you can be proud.

I did lots of lousy jobs, and usually ran out screaming after a few days or in some cases a few hours. The only jobs at which I lasted, which I almost liked, were house-cleaning and pizza delivery.

Any of a variety of cleaning jobs that require working in protective clothing and either a breathing apparatus or an air filter.

The sand blaster is one example. Another I just heard about: cleaning all the abandoned refrigerators down in Louisiana, full of rotting food, in that protective clothing and mask, in the Louisiana heat.

Another one: cleaning the inside of large chemical storage tanks (I don’t know how often or exactly what kind of tank, but I know its done-I’ve met someone who did it). Again, in protective clothing, gasping through an air filter, staring through a mask, sweating your life out all day.

Sk

I’m inclined to agree with people who have suggested various slaughterhouse jobs. They’re violent, dangerous (in both chronic and acute ways), have a (dis)assembly line pace, and they’re messy. This is a good time to point out that the workers at the largest pork-processing plant (over 2000 hogs a day!) need our help now. They’ve been working to get a union for a decade, and their bad jobs have been made worse by the intimidation, firing, and beatings unleashed on them by Smithfield, their employer.

We should also remember just how subjective all of this is. People commute in as long as two hours to get to Tar Heel, so clearly the jobs at Smithfield aren’t the worst things they can imagine. Different people, of course, have different requirements for a job. For some people, the loneliness, boredom, and poor air quality of a toll-taker might be the worst possible job. For others, the enforced socialiablity of various pink collar jobs might be terrible. Some people mind manual labor, some people don’t. Some people are willing to put up with conditions with poor occupational health in exchange for other things.

All of which is to point out the importance of unions–the method by which workers can together decide what is an isn’t acceptable, set standards, and enforce them.

I’d think that Jizz moper for the jerk-off video booths should be pretty high on the list.

Washing dishes in a tex mex restaurant after college was pretty bad. (Yes, that’s what I did with my philosophy degree).

Ginger Yellow,

Please see my comment above at 4:15 p.m.

More from Popular Science in 2003:

1. FLATUS ODOR JUDGE

Odor judges are common in the research labs of mouthwash companies, where the halitosis-inflicted blow great gusts of breath in their faces to test product efficacy. But Minneapolis gastroenterologist Michael Levitt recently took the job to another level—or, rather, to the other end. Levitt paid two brave souls to indulge repeatedly in the odors of other people’s farts. (Levitt refuses to divulge the remuneration, but it would seem safe to characterize it thusly: Not enough.) Sixteen healthy subjects volunteered to eat pinto beans and insert small plastic collection tubes into their anuses (worst-job runners-up, to be sure). After each “episode of flatulence,” Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity. The odor judges then sat down with at least 100 samples, opened the caps one at a time, and inhaled robustly. As their faces writhed in agony, they rated just how noxious the smell was. The samples were also chemically analyzed, and—eureka!—Levitt determined definitively the most malodorous component of the human flatus: hydrogen sulfide.

Levitt defends his work against the reflexively dismissive by noting that doctors have never studied flatulence and that smell is a potentially critical medical symptom: “The odors of feces and intestinal gas and breath could all be important markers of gastrointestinal health,” he says. Hydrogen sulfide, for instance, is an extremely toxic gas to mammals, potentially playing a role in ulcerative colitis, among other diseases. And so Levitt has dedicated his career to the study of the myriad fragrances produced by the human gut and imprudently ignored by the medical establishment.

2. DYSENTERY STOOL-SAMPLE ANALYZER

In the early ’80s, Virginia Tech profs Tracy Wilkins and David Lyerly studied the diarrhea-causing microbe Clostridium difficile in sample after sample after sample of loose stool from the disease’s victims. They became such crack dysentery docs that they launched a company, Techlab, dedicated to making stool-analysis kits. Today, Techlab employs 40 people, 19 of whom spend their working hours opening sloppy stool canisters and analyzing their contents in order to test the effectiveness of the company’s kits. You’d have to have a pretty good sense of humor, right? Well, fortunately, they do. The Techlab Web site sells T-shirts with cartoons on the front (two flies hover over two blobs of dung; one says to the other, “Pardon me, is this stool taken?”) and the company motto on the back: “Techlab: #1 in the #2 Business!”

3. BARNYARD MASTURBATOR

Researchers who want animal sperm —to study fertility or for artificial insemination—have a suite of attractive options: They can ram an electric probe up an animal’s rectum, shove an artificial vagina onto the animal’s penis, or simply do it the old-fashioned way—manual stimulation. The first option, electroejaculation, uses a priapic rectal probe to send electricity pulsing through the animal’s nether regions. “All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe,” says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. “It’s fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking.” Electroejaculation generally requires anesthetizing the animal and is typically used on zoo dwellers. The other two methods—the artificial vagina, or AV, and the good old hand—require that animals be trained to the procedure. The AV—a large latex tube coated with warm lubricant —is used primarily to get sperm from dairy bulls (considered the most ornery and dangerous of bovines). The bull gets randy with a steer; when he mounts the steer with his forelegs, a brave technician, AV in hand, insinuates himself between the two aroused beasts and deftly redirects the bull penis into the mock genitalia, which he must then hold tight while the bull orgasms. (Talk about bull riding!) Three additional technicians attempt to ensure this (fool)hardy soul’s safety by anchoring themselves to restraining ropes attached to a ring in the bull’s nose. Alas, this isn’t always absolutely effective: Everyone who’s wielded an AV has had at least one close call, and more than a few have been sent to the hospital. The much safer “digital pressure” is used mostly with pigs, who are trained from an early age to mount a small bench while the researcher reaches around with a gloved hand and provides appropriate pleasure—er, pressure.

The best job in science? We nominate the pig.

I’m glad I don’t work in the sciences.

Among the 10 worst jobs in science according to popsci.com (2005):

10: Orangutan Pee Collector
7: Spermbank semen washer
3: Kansas Biology Teacher
2: Manure Inspector
1: Human Lab Rat (Univ. of California San Diego apparently had some World War I nerve gas injected into students who were paid $15/hr. to take part in a study).

Anyway, the whole thing is available here:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/806ffb24a5f27010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Coal miner?

It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,
Where danger is double and pleasures are few,
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

Darker still when mine safety regulations are watered down by mine executives appointed to government regulatory positions.

It seems to me that focusing on the really rare “icky” jobs distracts from the fact that a lot of people work at jobs that are quite bad.

In other words–how many of this blogs readers can imagine thinking that $8/hour and health insurance is a really good job–worth driving 2 hours each way and working in very unpleasant conditions?

Er, sorry. That last post was directed at #42.

As noted above, don’t underestimate the soul sucking factor. I’ve worked a number of unskilled light industrial jobs that leave you aching, dirty and poor after a days work, but the absolute worst jobs I’ve ever had were in telephone sales. The pay is based on a commission, and making a sale is highly, highly correlated with reaching an elderly person who’s so lonely that they’ll stay on the phone, listen to your pitch, and make a purchase just to have somebody to talk to.

Having been both a checkout chick and changed diapers in a nursing home, I’d say that the diaper-changing is worse and the smell is appalling, but you get a lot more hugs in that job than that of checkout chick.

I worked at the supermarket part-time during high school, and the shocking thing for me was realising that for most of my full-time colleagues this was the highlight of their day. They got out of the house, plenty of people contact, and some money. It was a very strong motive to study for my exams.

The problem with such jobs isn’t the workflow, it’s the compensation and benefits.

DE GUSTIBUS, DAMMIT!!! These jobs were trips through hell for me–the lousy pay and benefits are icing on the cake. I have panic attacks on long plane trips–not because I’m scared of flying but because being confined physically scares the hell out of me: I never go to movies, concerts or any events where I have to sit in an audience. I’m also deathly shy and anything where I have to have a lot of people contact is a misery. The best lousy jobs I’ve had were driving jobs–pizza delivery and delivering newspapers in bulk–followed closely by housecleaning. I’ve happily traded off pay to avoid physical constraint, dressing up and people contact.

I was impressed at an early age by William Morris’ News From Nowhere. One of Morris unfeasible crackpot Fabian Socialist ideas was that the worst jobs, i.e. those that provided the greatest misery for the greatest number, should be the most highly paid so that people could make trade-offs between job satisfaction and other satisfactions. I still think this would be a great idea however the Market certainly won’t deliver it since the lousiest jobs are done by people with the fewest bargaining chips and there are lots of them so lousy jobs are overcrowded and hence poorly paid.

I’m also wondering why I’m the only one that’s even mentioned the issue of sex segregation in employment. This is a biggie! Barbara Bergmann argues, plausibly, that wages and benefits for pink-collar jobs are low because thee occupations are over-crowded. Women, particularly women without college degrees, are restricted to a narrow range of occupations so within these occupations wages, benefits and working conditions deteriorate.

Gotta say it worked out for me. If I were a guy and could have worked construction, or much better trained for and gotten skilled blue collar work–as an electrician, plumber, mechanic or appliance repairman–I’d have jumped at it and never bothered going to college much less getting a PhD. The academic life is pure bliss–and being a tenured full professor is the closest thing to the beatific vision of which we are capable. I am sure as hell glad that I’m a tenured full professor rather than a plumber even though I’m probably paid less. But if I were a guy and had to make a decision at 18 whether to go for plumbing or philosophy, given the costs in terms of years of student poverty and the risks, you had better believe I’d have picked plumbing. I don’t mind shit.

Hi,

Finally in Crooked Timber we have a thread with the potential to live forever and to provide everlasting social value! Adolescent children should be forced to read it even before they’re forced to read “Great Expectations”.

My own worst job was as the laborer on the asphalt laminating machine (you don’t care to know)in a building products factory. But mortuary attendant also had it moments. Nevertheless, I’m not whining. I probably got by easy.

As a male, I’ve got to believe it would be really tough to be a prostitute. Wouldn’t care to be a proctologist either. Okay, I suppose I tend to be somewhat squeamish about the nether regions of other people, but those are really bad jobs, right?

I think there was once a comedy sketch on the “Steve Allen Show” about the world’s worst jobs. The one I’ve always remembered is the person whose job it is to put the firing pins in hand grenades.

This really needs to develop into a canonical list and awards process. It would be hard to find good judges though.

Have a nice day,

Antti

coming late and in defense of the toll-booth attendant claim – my partner knew a woman who worked as a ticket collector at a Japanese railway station. This job involves standing in a little booth while all the quantillions of passengers pass you by and hand you their ticket. Apparently people would quite regularly stub their cigarettes out on her hand as they walked by. Usually they would be lost in the crowd before she could stop them, even if she were allowed to.

The soul-suckingness inherent in these types of jobs is not the nature of the manual or intellectual labour, but the fact that you are completely vulnerable to abuse from every arsehole in the world who passes you by. And that`s a lot of arseholes. That would be particularly true for toll booth attendants in the UK, US and Oz, where people think being in their car makes them the arrogant arsehole who rules the universe.

(Plus, I bet toll-booth attendants have a high casualty rate from car accidents, including from that small percentage of arsehole who think it`s fun to pretend to hit them, and then accidentally do).

Being untenured was pretty soul-sucking–having to bow and scrape and suck up to undergraduates, our customers, to get good evaluations. I never cared that much about having my soul sucked though–so long as I didn’t have to do boring, repetitious work under close supervision. That’s a reasonable trade-off: sucking up to undergraduates, much as I hate it, isn’t nearly as bad as data entry or supermarket checking.

Now I’m tenured and don’t bother. I could get paid more if I got good evaluations, but I don’t give a damn. I’d rather do what I please, and do what I think is the right thing in my teaching.

Still, I don’t like teaching one bit. Even though it’s not boring, repetitious or closely supervised, it involves sucking up and people contact, and there’s nothing to show for it at the end of the day. I like the preparation, structuring my courses, writing handouts and setting up my class websites, but I hate lecturing and dealing with students during office hours. The job is so good though–the autonomy and chance to do research–that even subtracting the misery of teaching it’s still be best job on earth. When I got tenure I xeroxed my tenure letter 10 times over and framed a copy with the caption: “safe from the typing pool–forever!” I’ve had that hanging over my desk ever since. That’s why I’m in this game.

Interesting about angry, miserable, youngish men engaged in white-collar drudgery. I frequent Inside Higher Ed where threads are regularly invaded by this lot and their undergraduate aspirants cursing academics as overpaid, underworked bums and demanding “accountability.” They’re punching the clock, sitting office park carrels doing this soul-sucking drudgery, resent the fact that we have offices and autonomy, and imagine that we’re being paid more than they are. That’s the bottom line in the attack on Academia by conservatives.

I’m not getting paid nearly as much as they are and don’t have the goodies that they take for granted–the chance to choose my job and where I live. But I’m perfectly happy to pay whatever it takes out of my potential wages for the office and autonomy, and to sacrifice the choice of where I live and virtually anything else for it.

The academic life is a vocation, not a career much less a job. The question is: are you willing to sacrifice everything to avoid boredom and constraint, and to get job satisfaction. I am.

Way upthread, “People like us, sitting at our computers in our comfortable chairs, don’t have a clue what a truly bad job is like.”

Clearly disproved by the examples, and I would add that perhaps many of us are sitting at our computers in our comfortable chairs because we have a clue what a truly bad job is like.

My own candidate (seen, not done; I was doing fire watch or similar at time) is cleaning out the sulfur pits at an oil refinery. Refineries are a gallery of vile smells, but the sulfur was in a class by itself.

Uh, that would be my job: telephone sales.

Abb1: If I’m not mistaken, SNL called “assistant crack whore” the worst job in America.

Now, cashiers in a supermarket: in the US typically they are not allowed to work sitting on a chair or stool, correct? Why is that; it’s such a meaningless cruelty, isn’t it?

I’m a bleeding heart in favor socialized medicine and other progressive European things, but come on. Cashiers need to be standing when they work.

Aww jeez..
I grew up on a dairy farm, and that can be pretty soul sucking. If you like the outdoors and don’t mind cattle (and I loathe them)and hard work that is daily and unremitting, it could be ok. I have worked (lasted less than a week) in a chicken processing plant (late ’70s, there was a ‘lung gun’ a vacuum for viscera, if you will) and that was pretty awful, sinking, and refrigerated and repetitive. I doubt it has improved much.
Even the best jobs or the ‘dream jobs’ can become hellish: I have had a 20 year career as a artist in fiber, and even with some success, you can find yourself in a impossible work situation. I had a number of commissioned works, contracts I felt I had to take to feed my family, where the timelines were totally unrealistic. My technique was the handwrapping of yarn (mostly carpet or commercial embroidery yarns) onto cores of of roping or upholstery welt, and repetitive stress was always a problem. In 2000, I received a commission from the Atlanta Braves for a fiber hanging to commemorate their hosting of the All-Stars game in April for June delivery. I worked 700 hours in 12 weeks to make “Three Pennants” a hanging of three overlapping pennant forms (one for each World Series won by the Braves franchise, in Boston, Milwaukee, and Atlanta) 12’x37′.
I have serious rotator cuff issues from that commission… And the 16= hour days at the end are a blur to me now.
I now work light construction/handyman…It can be tough (the week of New Year’s I was digging out a crawlspace to insulate under a workshop), but since I live in a beautiful area (the Southern Appalachians) it has it’s perks..

“I’m a bleeding heart in favor socialized medicine and other progressive European things, but come on. Cashiers need to be standing when they work.”

If this is supposed to be sarcastic it is too subtle. If you are serious let me be the first to say, what the fuck!!!!!????

My brother had an industrial cleaning firm that cleaned Chicken and Catfish processing plants and Elderly care facilities. He thought the Catfish plants were the most disturbing until he realized that government supervision (mind you, this was before the present administration took over) for the food plants was superior to that of facilities for our older citizens. If a chicken or catfish plant has a hygene problem, it gets shut down immediately, and the owners are under immediate cost pressure to clean things up. With a retirement home, the report has a long way to travel before any corrective measure is forced, meaning in practice that these homes can do just about anything before getting shut down.

Re: the crack whore portion of the thread, I must clear up the record. Every year, when the year’s “best job” was announced by whoever announced it, the SNL news guy (was it Dennis Miller? or that other smarmy guy?) would make a job about the worst job.

Year 1, the worst job was crack whore. Year 2, there was an updated worst job, which was assistant crack whore. Year 3, assistant crack whore was replaced by crack whore trainee.

Yes, I was watching all 3 times. Yes, I did need a life back then. (Still do.)

w/r/t the main thread, I think that “soul-sucking” is a critical factor, and that what sucks your soul probably varies from person to person. F’r instance, for anybody who cares about animals, killing animals (slaughterhouse “technician”) would be the worst. Some people wouldn’t be bothered by it. Also, if you love talking to people, then supermarket checker would probably be a great job. Similarly, even “threat of death” doesn’t necessarily make something a bad job, if you think your job is worth it, i.e. soldier.

Working in battlefield clearance can’t be pleasant.

You get to identify and remove mutilated, decomposing corpses and ownerless body parts. Some of the dead may have been your friends. Where you work is probably full of unexploded ordnance, mines, booby traps and other objectionable stuff (which you might also have to remove, if you know how to do it).

You may have to work in extremes of temperature, and there is a high risk of catching disease if you aren’t careful.

To top it all, you only get a soldier’s wage, which can be shockingly low, depending on whose army you’re in.

h. e. baber,

Supermarket clerks in various regions of the country have widely different wages and healthcare benefits and a diversity of union representation.

If the people doing this job found the work environment so poor, why does is job process (standing up, close supervision, etc. so similar?)

It may be that your aversion to close supervision, public contact, and repetitive tasks is very much greater than the average member of the UFCW.

Dennis: Washing dishes in a tex mex restaurant after college was pretty bad.

I had a job once washing dishes in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Tucson called Woody Mercer’s Cowboy Lounge. It was one of the most entertaining jobs I ever had. Everybody else in the kitchen spoke Spanish, which I didn’t understand, all the time. The barbeque was super good. A couple or three of the waitress were very pretty, and the hostess was a knockout. I still remember her high-heel boots. Woody Mercer himself played guitar and sang country. It’s wonderful being in Tucson as soon as the sun sets; a few times I was almost perfectly happy working.

Now the best job I ever had, not the best for me for sure but clearly the most useful for the human race, was when I was the operator of a sewage treatment plant.

H.E. Baber-Of course these jobs have to be done, but they can be improved—supermarket checkers can sit rather than stand.
I’m a supermarket checker. I’d prefer to stand, thanks all the same. Sitting in that context is much harder on the back.
For sheer ghastliness my personal experience in previous jobs offers up custodial maintenance on the bed-ridden basically indigent or nearly-so elderly, especially cranky males who create such a fuss to be left alone the less-imaginative orderlies do in fact leave them alone. Which means the next shift or the one after has to get in there and clean dried-up fecal matter out of their ass-cracks, which may have begun to ulcerate, while they scream for the nurses and Godly help and fight with all of their dwindled strength to hurt and/or get away from you.
That was not particularly fulfilling nor did it lead to an end-of day calm, particularly. More like to abb1’s drugs and alcohol.
On the other hand, working for mean and sadistic people who have power over you, and relish it, and use it to get satisfaction from your being crushed between a need for work and their hellish fun at your expense, regardless of the actual conditions on the job or the nature of the work itself, has to be the worst of all.

“Cashiers need to be standing when they work.”

Small note from Europe on supermarket check-out personnel. I have yet to see a supermarket where cashiers need to be standing all day. They have stools at their disposal and use them.

That said, sometimes cashier take a break doing their jobs “standing”. Main problem for them, I asked some of them, seems to be their lower backs since they often have to grab a heavy item, turn to pass it in front of the scanner and then turn some more to push it aside. Standing makes that gesture more comfortable.

So, everybody can rest assured. Cashiers here have the best of both worlds. They can sit and stand.

I worked as a checker briefly and the standing didn’t bother me at all–generally I’d rather stand than sit at most things: it was the boredom, repetition and exposure was awful. C’mon, this issue isn’t whether standing is better than sitting or vice versa, but the badness of jobs–the boredom, the absence of anything to show at the end of the day, the constraint, and in some cases the filth and danger.

#3 said:

“I think I read somewhere that the occupation with the highest mortality is soap opera character.”

Yeah, but soap opera characters often rise from the dead. Sometimes even more than once.

The two worst types of jobs for me would be any kind of direct sales (I am not a talking-people-into-doing-stuff person) or nonthinking jobs (like the tollbooth job) that don’t allow you to bring a book or sudoku or whatever to work to keep the mind active.

A troubling flaw in a philosopher

More troubling to me is that here is yet another teacher who doesn’t like teaching or interacting with students, who teaches only to escape a worse job. Guess Prof Baber’s students get an accidental course in situational ethics.

Well, I was going to let my anecdote be, but I see a lot of superficially similar criticisms I don’t agree with at all. My position is this: the “good” job done by large numbers of people isn’t to be found under actually existing capitalism. And in addition to being unsafe and underpaying, it is true that mainstream work environments often offer very little opportunity to display agency of any kind, something that adult human beings rightly take pleasure in. Grocery checking is pretty much just like any other common job in this respect, i.e. vastly less preferable than one’s time not working — and people who speculate about the easygoing nature of UFCW members could easily test their theory.

But I actually think that in a more just society, there would be fewer “directive” jobs of the sort that Professor Baber seems to find more suitable to human flourishing. One of the good things about lots of these bad jobs is that they provide what is clearly a valuable social service, as opposed to being, say, a hedge fund manager. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part (I myself found studying analytic philosophy “seriously” to be one of hell’s minima), but it seems to me that the good for all has to be sought in what can realistically be done by all, and that means a focus on the badness of common jobs in terms of making them better. Someone, as they say, has gotta do it.

This reminds me of a quote from an assistant football coach at my high school, who was in charge of the weight room:

“I want you little horseshits to remember one thing before you go get your neck broken: some guys get stronger on accident than you’ll ever get on purpose.”

To wit, there was a recent incident in America where a kid tried to rob an old man in a store line, but the old man felt the hand in his pocket, grabbed the kid’s arm, and beat him near within an inch of his life. Although the man was 72, he had been a Golden Gloves boxer, a Marine, and then a steelworker for several decades. That’s just bad.

Dang. “without empathy”, in the last sentence of 98.