Opus 2013-198: Where Have All the Jobs Gone

I have students at school bragging that they are going to make more money than I do, they are going to drive a trash truck.  They may be right.  What they don’t realize is that trash collection is just another example of why they may not get a job. 

Think of the history of trash collection.  Yes, I am sure it has a history.  Everything has a history.  One of the greatest sources of history are called kitchen middens.  They are the places, outside the back door, where ancient households dumped their trash.  Eventually, locations outside town might have been used.  There are still places in our country where people load up a trailer with their trash and take it to the dump. 

I can remember watching the trash trucks when I was a kid in Southern California.  They would be high sided and open, with steps around the outside for the trash men.  When the trucks came by they would be swarming with men who would jump off, pick up your can, upend it over the side of the truck and jump back on.  If they were really good the truck did not even come to a full stop.  They would proceed down the street leaving a trail of empty trash cans, some of them still bouncing.  This was labor intensive.  You did not need a college degree to get a job. 

Today we have these behemoth machines run by one man.  He sits behind the wheel working levers.  The hydraulics do all the work.  I am guessing that you need a special license and training to work this monster.  It looks like fun for a few minutes and monotony the rest of your life.

The problem is that where a dozen jobs used to exist, now there is one. 

Just another example of technology at work.  Will your job be next?

homo unius libri