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 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”.