FWIW, I don't believe that white collar are all easy . . . but I've found them on average to be easier and to pay better.
I don't think you could generalise this; otherwise, if the typical white collar job was both easier and better-paying than the blue collar jobs, one would think why anyone would bother doing retail/customer service/other blue collar jobs at all - why work harder for less money?
This is also an illogical question.
Most white collar jobs require education, and a lot of people stuck in low paying jobs cannot afford education and/or don't have the aptitude for it.
It's pretty safe to say that the vast majority of people who *can* get a white collar jobs do. And yes, some jobs that require a lot of skill are actually quite easy once you get there, because they require more skill, which you have, than labour.
Law, some surgery, dentistry, IB, etc, usually requires a lot of labour on top of skill, but other roles require more skill/knowledge/capital investment than labour and get easier and easier as time goes on. Lasik surgeons and cosmetic derms depend on hard labour a lot less than cardio surgeons or ER docs.
The grind to get to the level of skill where making money is easy is a barrier to many.
My current white collar job is very easy for me, not because it's an easy job, it's objectively brutal, but because I have a unique set of skills/knowledge to draw on that make it really comfortable for me to do. I've gone through the years of experience to build the capacity for this kind of work.
But sometimes, when it's a bit outside of my wheelhouse, it kicks me in the mutherfucking teeth because sometimes I step into something that I don't have exceptional skills to handle and it stops being easy, real quick.
So yes, very demanding, elite jobs can be remarkably easy in some contexts where the person is primarily being paid to have the knowledge that they have, not to perform laborious tasks that they've trained to do.
My job is to have a conversation that feels entirely natural to me. I'm paid for the knowledge behind that conversation, not for anything within the conversation that takes much effort on my part...most of the time.
My former white collar job was to perform grueling manual labour tasks at a break-neck pace.
The two pay about the same per hour, btw.
I see that you differentiate between work which is difficult (i.e. requires objective skill to master) and work which is laborious (i.e. requires subjective effort and sweat) - whereas I tend to conflate the two concepts. It's true that they are different things, and a job can be any combination of the two. Your market wage will be dictated by the rarity of your skillset, which is why a non-difficult but laborious job does not pay well, whereas a difficult but non-laborious job may pay well, but only if the difficulty is such that it poses a major barrier to entry. In that kind of a job, I don't think I'd describe the worker as not working hard, because it will likely have taken a great deal of diligence and training and sacrifice to build up the skillset in the first place to get to the stage where it's not laborious.
The question is, is the work hard from a general perspectives or is it hard for the individual.
But the people I was responding to weren't talking about the skill level of a job, they were talking about how grueling it is for the individual, saying that white collar workers couldn't handle blue collar jobs because of how brutal the experience is of doing those jobs.
My particular job is frequently not hard
for me because of my unique skill set, but it would be brutally hard for many of my colleagues. Likewise, many of their jobs might be easy for them, but hard for me. Overall, the work in my industry is considered very hard when looked at from the outside, but can be easy or brutal when perceived from the individual perspective.
One of my key points was for people to compare apples to apples. If someone wants to say that a white collar job is easier than a blue collar job, then you should compare jobs with similar labour tasks if we're comparing individual work experiences and whether someone white collar could move easily into a blue collar job.
If we're asking if people can easily move from one kind of labour to a completely different kind of labour, that's a totally different question, and that's where the skill
and labour involved really come into play.
It would be easier for me to transition into a lot of blue collar jobs than for me to trade jobs with one of my mentors who works primarily with people with severe delusions. I have zero training in working with delusions, but I could easily handle
As to your point, no, I don't think that I work very hard when I'm doing tasks that I'm over skilled for. I worked very hard to get
to that skill level, but because I'm at that level, I no longer need to work very hard to perform really well much of the time.
Sometimes high skill work is legitimately not very hard if you're skilled up enough. Sometimes high skill work is brutal no matter how skilled you are. Depends on the kind of work.
But no, I'm not going to call something hard from the individual perspective, if it's stupidly easy to do because of the skill level.
Like, I can draw someone's face in a few minutes, I'm stupidly skilled at portrait sketching. But a painting would take labour. The sketching requires skill, but it's easy. The painting requires skill, but it's labour intensive, so it's hard.
I hear what you're saying and I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that referring to a job as "hard" can just mean that the job requires a lot of skill and knowledge. But that use isn't relevant to the conversation that I was replying to. People were very specifically talking about whether a given job would be hard for the individual to perform.
If we talking that from that perspective, then plenty of high skill jobs are easy
for the highly skilled people performing then.
