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comment by aidrocsid
aidrocsid  ·  3166 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: No Time to Be Nice at Work

Archived to avoid paywall.

I was going to take the quiz but it's pretty specific to office work. It's weird how people seem to assume that everyone works in offices when transportation is the biggest job in America. Maybe that's just their target audience, though.





psudo  ·  3165 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, it wasn't until this Planet Money piece came out that I realized that trucking is really that common. I can't help but wonder if everything targets office work as what the average job looks like thanks to that being what the media portrays it as. Which then begs the question of why that's the case. I have some ideas as to why that could be, but over all I think it's a very interesting question.

aidrocsid  ·  3165 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It seems like it depends on how you divide things up. For example there are a lot of articles like this one from last year that list the top 10 jobs in the country without even mentioning trucking at all.

You find weird stuff like that in statistics though. So truck driving may be the most popular job in most states, but you'll notice that most of those states have fairly low populations. California is the real exception here, but in addition to having highly populated areas California is where most of our fruit is being shipped out from to begin with, so I'd imagine that's somewhat to be expected. Look at the big population centers on the East coast, though. In those densely populated regions truckers aren't in the majority.

I saw something else recently that put the transportation industry (not only trucking but also taxis, livery, and bus services) at somewhere around 3.5 million, putting it at the top, but it seems like it's really in large part about how you're dividing things and what jobs you're lumping together.

At any rate, if there are some heavily populated states where secretaries are the biggest job, that tells us that there are at least a fair number of offices still around. Not everybody has a secretary, and I'd generally expect that even most executives don't have more secretaries than they do other types of subordinates. They probably have like one. If we're tracking a job as specific as secretary, then, that gives us an indication that all those other office work jobs will be split up into so many different things that individually they won't add up to much.

So maybe office work is actually in the majority or at least a pretty sizeable minority. Certainly not enough to pretend that everybody works in an office, though.