jakethesnake:
Rjan:
In my view, audible feedback is an important sense that the driver has - not just the truck driver, but any driver or person on the road. I no more wear headphones at the wheel than I do when walking the street. Yes, it can mostly be compensated for by extra concentration and visual observation, but it’s harder work and less reliable - just like lipreading is hardly any substitute for hearing.
As for driving not being a skilled job, what is a skilled job in your view? It’s no less involved overall than plumbing or carpentry, say, which are generally considered to be skilled.
Totally agree with you first view. Not quite so sure about the second though! It’s a different kind of involvement and dare I say it not so skilled.
You could argue that jobs involving reading and writing are not so skilled, if you overlook the years of training, expense, and almost singular dedication that go into getting people to read and write properly.
It takes years and costs hundreds of thousands of pounds overall to put kids through formal education even just to secondary level, and when I talk of singular dedication, kids go through that process without being expected to perform a full-time productive job or manage a household at the same time. Some still leave without being great at it, even when special efforts are made - some because they’re just not suited to it at all, others because their circumstances derail the schooling process and are never addressed.
The real difference between plumbing and carpentry is that most of our dads were not plumbers or carpenters and you rarely see the work done or what tools and techniques it involves, and if you became one then you often came to it fresh when you left school (except the odd woodwork class).
Whereas most of us learn the principles of the roads from a young age, spend lots of time travelling in vehicles (if only the school bus, but certainly enough to grasp what the driver is doing, what main controls he has, and so forth), have a car licence and some driving experience before we have a HGV licence, etc.
In the forces where you might go straight to HGV, you’re given months of up-front training and extensive further supervision. You’re not just put through a few weeks training at 18, then thrown the keys of a truck and told to take it to Germany on your own, because too many lads would come a cropper before they got there - or would get there too slowly.
Take an experienced and confident car driver, and you can get a wagon to move safely enough with a week’s training, but there’s a lot more to a driver’s job than a week’s training, including the fact that you’re self-selecting, the tacit knowledge of the roads that you bring to the training already, and the mountain of associated knowledge you gain on the job of special equipment, particular sites, unusual situations, and proper judgments, which all allow you to work effectively on your own.
Put a person with already reasonable dexterity in front of timber or pipework for 40 solid hours, and they’ll undoubtedly be able to chisel a basic joint or solder two pieces together, but given a normal day’s work they’ll either make too many mistakes, do it too slowly, or require almost constant attention from an experienced man.
I have a lot to say on this because it’s obvious that this narrative about “unskilled work” is mainly used to try and argue that workers who do such allegedly “unskilled” work shouldn’t be paid reasonable wages to do it.
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