This is over 20 years old, and I'm sure doesn't hold true in all areas, but at least at one point there was high demand to be a "san man" ("san" as in "sanitation") in NYC:

> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/249/garbage

These guys are/were unionized, which certainly helps.

I don't know if I would call it high pay anywhere ive lived. It is okay pay around me right now in a less prosperous area of the country for not requiring tools or previous skills. But the main thing going for it around here is stability of hours, a decent amount of holidays off, and you don't have to destroy your body.

For manual labor I thought the guys I know who do garbage pickup have a great job - their hours are shifted so they work from 4am to noon so they have plenty of time for hobbies and family outside of that. All the time sitting and driving the truck is hard though they rarely have to handle anything manually with standardized bins and hydraulic lifts.

I guarantee you that a lot more people would be willing to put up with it for $10 million a year.

Garbage collectors where I live used to make $30-$35/hr starting wage. It was a good job and they always had applicants.

Now they have the trucks that dump the bins without getting out of the truck. The driver's make $18/hr.

okay, so the lack of robots/supply increases garbage collector wages, which broadly results in wealth distribution vs robots.

> But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade.

There's a lot of value in knowing about more than just one thing. Anyone leaving their university with a degree should have at least some exposure to topics outside of the field they want to work in. People are more than just their jobs, having a well rounded education is useful, and matters outside of the field of medicine still have real impacts on the lives of doctors.

I'd certainly feel better about going to a doctor who has a reasonable baseline understanding of the rest of the world outside of his work. You could argue that people looking to become doctors should able to avoid some percentage of the other classes they're forced to take, but doctors can often pick up some relevant credits while still fulfilling those requirements too.

That’s a North American quirk.

Japan's employment rate is hard to compare, in that many of these job just wouldn't be seen as real jobs in any other country ("bullshit job"), and it's compound by half of the population being over 50. A high employment among the elderly could just be masking the harsher truth when that upper half passes away.

It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)

Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.

I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film.

"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself." -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/

There's a subreddit for the NYC sanitation dept because it's so competitive to get into.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DSNY/comments/1rwayil/what_was_the_...

People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.

All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.

If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.

But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker going on a similar rant about how terrible the tech industry is.

Japan is very different than most cultures in cleaning after yourself. It's very ingrained in their psyche, e.g. school students are trained to clean their classrooms in organized way.

So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there (and it's super-clean as people trash way less).

Unlike many other developed countries, foreign employees working in cleaning and maintenance are still a minority. This is gradually changing, but I believe the main issue is that young people are completely uninterested in this kind of work. Most people working in these industries in Japan are old rather than foreign. The average is probably over 50+, and there are quite a few people working past retirement.

I clean shit for free often.

I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.

You’re allowed to type shit. We’re all adults here.

Out of curiosity, what percentage of a fried chicken snack's final cost do you think is labor from that 7-11 worker?

Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.

This is a linkage in theory but in practice it's an indirect linkage and the 7-11 owner does not have a handbook dictating how prices rise or fall relating to labour costs.

As evidenced by the non arrival of across the board 10% rises in meal costs when tipping is banned.

TL;DR cost and price linkage is not amenable to simplistic claims about the impact on pricing.

> You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.

You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.

This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.

Correct. I was using labor participation rates. As a society gets depressed and has a hard time people stop trying (ie they no longer count as unemployed, which doesnt count the people who are no longer trying to get a job).

Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)