All the risks and none of the rewards. I work in chemical handling; we're talking hazmat suit, respirator, and barrels of neurotoxin and acid. My wife is a nurse aide in a psychiatric ward; we're talking covid, shingles, piss, shit and former murderers and rapists. I've had my lungs irritated by gas leaks, skin burned by splashes. My wife has been punched, scratched, stalked, and even had a table hurled at her. She currently looks like Anakin with a huge scratch on her face. I work 12 hrs, she frequently works 16 hours, night shifts for both of us. I've had to watch her sob from exhaustion and the emotional pain of constant racial insults from the patients. We should be sleeping all day, making doctor visits and grocery shopping a special kind of hell. And how much are we compensated? She gets $22/hr, I get $24. We have enough to live on, but that's really it. We both have bachelor's degrees in our respective fields. In the US, that's the top of the bottom 1/3 for income.
It's even worse for wear house workers, having their spines ground down to dust. It's even worse for soldiers who are killed for pennies an hour. Retail workers get murdered by the public.
And yet it seems like if you have an email/Excell/coding job, you will earn so much more, you will get to work from home, you will get to sleep at night, you will be exposed to no hazards, diseases, or toxins. “Get a better job” they say, but if no one does these hazardous jobs, we have no health care and we have no manufacturing.
We need equitable compensation! I think all hazardous environment workers need to band together to create an encompassing union. Too long have unions been divided to their smallest, most ineffectual parts.