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.
Sure, I engage in dangerous hobbies (shooting, kickboxing and driving). But I do them because they are fun and take up a relatively short amount of time. That’s much different than at least 40 hours a week doing something like logging or working in Alaskan commercial fishing.
Someone who enjoys being out at sea, or in the woods might find those occupations fun 🤷♂️
So we’d bank the species survival on the hope enough people will enjoy these jobs with no added incentive aside from the intrinsic reward?
Or on the hope that enough people see that these jobs need to be done and try to find solutions other than sending humans to do them. We’re humans, we have technology.
Outsourcing the labor to tech is the closest to reasonable answer that I’ve seen so far. Still not really a full solution though.
Im not saying that nor advocating communism, im just stating that what you said about the reason you think people only do those jobs, I believe at least, is false simply by counterargument. Ask any one of the people who enjoy that kind of work environment if they would ever work in an office, closed in a room seated at a desk all day, and most would probably say you couldnt pay them enough to do it. To them, even if you DO give them more money, its not a reward/compensation because they value different things.
Im one of the office-type people. Id like to think what I do has value to society, and I believe I would do it regardless of the compensation/regardless of if I got the same money as a lumberjack, because I enjoy it. Thats another angle: if everyone is paid the same, why not do what you enjoy. If what you enjoy is being in the woods cutting trees, or on a boat in the sea, or in a tower in isolation for weeks (fire watcher), or any number of other “undesirable” jobs, and youd still get paid a living wage for doing that, same as everyone else, why would you ever subject yourself to something miserable for you, for no better reward?
Why would anybody need to work 40 hours if it wasn’t for someone else’s profit?
24/7 organizations will exist regardless of profit like mine, electricity, Healthcare and hell even production environments for needed goods will have to operate.
Any organisation that needs to operate 24/7 with a work week of less than 40 hours would need to have more workers than they do with a 40 hour work week, simple as that. To oversimplify: we arrived at the 40 hour work week when business owners wanted people to work more and people rioted and formed unions to push back over 100 years ago. In other words, it’s arbitrarily set. We could organize society around a different length work week if we changed our goals from shareholder profit to better quality of life for all. Maybe being a lumbejack or alaskan fisherman wouldn’t be so bad if you only had to do it once a week or didn’t have to go out in storms and you still had food, shelter, and leisure activities provided by society.
Im not saying the 40 hour work week is needed. Maybe you’re right about more workers less time. I myself don’t work a traditional 40 hour week. Im on a 28 day rotational shift. Of those 28 days, I work 14, the other 14 are off, 7 days in a row every rotation as well. I love it but the days on are 12 hour days.
At the end of the day, a society like that would look a lot different than the our current one. Their would likely have to be some sacrifices. Maybe we decide that fishing in the Bering Strait isn’t worth it or no one wants to do it, I guess we’ll have to go without Alaskan crab. Maybe you couldn’t have a sports car. However, I think people would sooner go out and cut trees than go unhoused. We’ll just have to decide what we as a society want to put our efforts towards.
Your full days work presumably creates value for your employer, more than they pay you for. That’s what they use to cover their operating expenses and profit. Or maybe you work for a public utility that’s in debt. Regardless, imagine a society where all the value created by the people designing and producing Nvidia’s chips, Elon’s cars and spaceships, and the people mining all the materials for them, which we’ve decided is worth trillions of dollars, was used by society and in the pockets of people that actually spend it in the economy. A society with a work force like ours should be able to house and feed everyone. We already know there are more vacant houses than homeless people in North America, and we throw out enough food worldside to feed everyone. It’s hard to imagine how exactly a society would actually distribute all that to everyone like communism aims to do though, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible somehow. If everyone had enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and time to do what they want why wouldn’t they be alright going without Alaskan crab and other luxuries?
Maybe. I’m not a communist (or at least not a state communist), but I share with many of them the beliefs that this current system is broken beyond repair and that the solution(s) will require more than a change of who’s on our money or the precise method we use to decide whose skulls the police should bash in. If longevity and happiness for our species, no say nothing of the rest of the biosphere, are real goals, we may need a radical restructuring.
A less exploitative, more free world might involve having fewer comforts or getting used to the idea that the things other people provide us are gifts rather than entitlements. It might mean making do with less reliable electricity because no one is compelled to risk their life 24/7 to keep the lights on. Maybe it involves smaller infrastructure so that the benefit of maintaing one’s own neighborhood grid are obvious.
I think you sort of gave short shrift to the above answer because they failed to provide you with a detailed list of incentives. They did, however answer with a pretty cogent framework for what to do with dangerous work: eliminate it or make it less dangerous. If no one’s willing to do a job, that sure sounds like voting with their labor and determing that the job edesn’t need doing to me.
Below, you talk about banking our species survival on whether someone enjoys a job without reward. Enjoy? No. Find necessarry enough to spend a portion of their limited time on this earth doing it? Sure. Humans (and every other species) have survived for the vast majority of our history without industrialization and work as it is today. A more just future might look more like our past than like our present or an imagined future in some ways. Historically, we’ve organized ourselves in wildly different manners and there’s no reason we can’t do the same in the future.