It’s up to every individual to find the value for themselves, and commit to working on themselves, whatever that looks like.
How about you, what’s your plan?
I can tell you that it doesn't involve condescendingly lecturing blue collar workers about my culture being superior to theirs
The (literal) toxic work environment is why I left welding, even though I genuinely enjoyed the work. But I was already starting to see real changes in my health, even though I was super careful about respirator use, etc. What really sealed the deal was learning that my shift lead, who I thought was a good decade older than me, was actually a few years younger, but had just been welding longer, with the body damage to show for it.
Now think of how many guys there are out there doing it with no repository protection and the good ‘ole safety squints.
BLS is combining solder/brazing with welding. And has no concept of industrial vs fab, etc.
The data shows roughly 454k workers in the welders, solderers, and brazers occupation series. With their claim of 3.5 severe injuries per 100 worker-careers, that's about 16k severe injuries. If you assume an average career is about 25 years, that's about 636 severe injuries per year, compared to the 48 fatalities per year. So it's an order of magnitude higher (which I think is the direction most people would expect).
People who work dangerous jobs can get pretty callous about it. I saw people doing dangerous shit constantly. And the people with permanent injuries end up using gallows humor to cope.
Wouldn’t it be in your best interest to be kind and supportive to one another in such a dangerous / difficult environment? That way everyone is happy and confident and focuses on the stresses of the job, not the stress of being bullied or being cajoled into bullying for the sake of conformity?
What you’re describing sounds like it really only appeals to a certain kind of person, and I don’t understand how that kind of person makes a better welder.
I don't know why there's a need to define either of these as inferior and wrong - isn't the point of diversity to allow people from different backgrounds to take different approaches?
To me, personally, the "kind, supportive" style often comes off as insincere. It's actually a barrier to me trusting someone. But I don't know, maybe that's just me.
I've hesrd others express this. That someone belives the mean things about them rather than the nice ones says more.aboit their self image than the comments IMO.
Like - the whole point is fostering a comfortable work environment, where drama like this doesn’t happen, because people are careful of how they interact with others.
A ‘supposedly’ supportive environment filled with backstabbing and gossip is in fact not a supportive environment, so why bring it up as if it’s somehow a ‘gotcha’ or even related?
Do people really not understand what a comfortable, supportive environment populated by kind caring coworkers looks like?
How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.
Dudes in dangerous professions bond by calling each other slurs which is ok because they're all in on it, such that if you can't handle some bad words how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs, so you're either not cut out for the job.
You as an outsider from the nice people bubble don't have a say in this to lecture them since you're not in on it.
Sounds like a great way of excluding people from the workforce.
Apparently a lot of construction, extraction installation, maintenance and repair folk have a very bad time of i. Perhaps if they could get decent support in the work place that wouldn't happen. Though I suppose you'd probably conclude it's just natural attrition as the snowflakes kill themselves.
That's fine, but why do you think the culture should mould to your needs?
I think a professional work culture should generally be such as to allow the people who are capable of doing the work with the minimum ofaggression aimed at them. Controversial, I know.
Some dickhead flinging racial slurs at me all day doesn't make me feel that they have my back. Quite the opposite, actually.
You might argue that "punching up" is acceptable, or even that it's not slurring by definition (which I'd dispute), but membership of one "privileged class" doesn't automatically translate to actual privilege. (I think the feminists call this intersectionality.) In such a context, the labels of "privileged classes" absolutely can be used to punch down (e.g. saying "you're such a man" and slamming the door in the face of an impoverished gay transgender man trying to access domestic abuse services).
a derogatory or insulting term applied to a particular group of people.
"cisgender" has a technical meaning which is still it's primary use: someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth (so it can apply to intersex people as well). In this it is like "heterosexual" and "male". Arguably it is not like "white", in that who counts as white is malleable, but for the most part whatever it is, in most contexts, "white" is not a slur either.
* I am in fact a lapsed linguist. I have a PhD. My specialization was in semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is meaning encoded in language. Pragmatics is meaning inferred from use: "it's cold in here" meaning "shut the window", for example. I am aware that one can talk more precisely and at much, much greater length about all of this. But this is Hacker News, so this is all I am going to say.
I'd say "white" is no more or less malleable than the others. "Male" has multiple, mostly-overlapping definitions; by extension, "heterosexual" and "cisgender" are likewise flexible, though "heterosexual" has additional flexibility. While the concept of "white" is completely ungrounded in base reality, as a cultural term (a description of how racists categorise people, and of who's affected by the consequences) it's relatively stable: the definition in Western Europe is completely different to the definition in North America, and the boundaries have shifted over the centuries, but contemporary racists in a given racism-domain seem to agree with each other.
That is the point of the banter: to see how you handle stressful situations.
Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.
Why? For every accident, there are around twenty near misses. For every near miss there are several situations that could have gone bad very quickly unless the person on the spot remains calm and acts rationally.
It is essential to know how you behave under stress in most blue collar work. They're not being assholes for fun; they're doing it to save lives.
If I can't stay calm and think rapidly under mild social pressure without threat of bodily harm or lost lives, I personally wouldn't feel honest in telling my teammates, "yes, if you or I are in a situation with risk to life or limb, you should trust that I'll handle it appropriately and protect myself and/or you."
Our assumptions about who will succeed in the most difficult situations don't seem to hold up.
My own experience in tall ships and shipyards, where there are plenty of life and death decisions is not that.
There are people that I can fluster easily in a social situation that are perfectly calm and capable in high pressure dangerous situations. There are people that are practically insult comedians that I wouldn’t want driving a car in the same parking lot.
What actually seems to be the common factor is male groups in informal settings
I work in that industry and can say with confidence that statement is false.
Which is a good thing really, because I wouldn't want to think that people were actually determining fitness to be trusted with a soldering iron or embedded systems design based on their witty comebacks or tolerance for jokes about their wife.
Two things can be true at the same time: that this type of banter has undesirable consequences as well as desirable ones. This type of nuance is generally the sort of thing that's worth trying to understand before you try to 'fix' it.
I completely agree with you about the purpose and value of banter- but do you actually know any women or interact with any on a regular basis?
It's simply not true- women banter with each other just as much as men do, and they especially banter with men they are interested in romantically- for the exact reason you mention - to see if they handle stressful situations well, which is a desirable (attractive) trait in a romantic partner.
I'll admit women tend to be more subtle with this then men- such that some people (especially the ones who are failing the test) will mistake it as complaining or arguing.
I enjoy it very much when my wife does this- I usually respond by turning it into some kind of joke, or turning it back on her in a way she doesn't expect, and I can see her light up with joy that I 'got it' and didn't respond with frustration/etc.
Many places that require nice language are far more toxic. Or perhaps any place with strict behavior and language rules is toxic, it often seems to be the case.
The parent said that women don't get it. I disagree, most of them working in such environments get it just like men. There are some exceptions for either gender.
There’s nothing better for team cohesion than agreeing on the person you are going to bully
Hearing old stories of what people did make it seem like some sort of thug culture. I wonder what share of workplace 'accidents' was due to betting.
Assholes exist everywhere, but “we” don’t have to apologize for them or make the workplace a safer space for them.
It's a constant stream of "but my guys don't do this" "but my guys do do this".
It's all just rephrasing of, well, this is the highbrow culture, and this is the working class culture, and I'm in one or the other and you're abnormal.
The reality is that it's just two different worlds and where they clash things get weird.
Looking at _so many_ responses to my post, almost none of which actually have new content, makes me think this is some sort of dead internet bots vs. bots contest.
I never made a claim that "all men do X" or that "shop talk and banter are fairly universal". I did point out that I and my friends do not mock our friends and colleagues.
Still avoiding positive claims, but here are some normative claims:
- I object to claiming that mocking is normal and acceptable in all groups of men
- some, not all, working class subcultures use mocking as a shibboleth
- this aspect of those subcultures is not a thing I think "we" should valorizeJust telling the truth in a low key softball way where we can all laugh, and of course you're laughing right along with me.
Even so, categorical prohibitions of mockery (in society, in particular workplaces, whatever) are truly and obviously joyless propositions. Maybe they're warranted in some contexts! But to say 'there can be no mockery' is indeed inherently stifling.
Is that not down to the culture? I found some of the warmest workplaces were also the places were everyone was constantly shitting on each other and not taking it too serious. I'd not say it was bullying, as everyone got a piece. There was a certain toughness to it, but at the same time everyone was caring deeply for one another.
I think the current tendency to prevent all possibility to upsetting behaviour is overshooting the mark.
Against bullying is a good movement.
Against all possibly upsetting remarks is basically being against banter and killing a part of what makes us human. I hope that free speech remains allowed and to some extend "uncancelable".
Would you say this is more typical in groups of men, or among the men within a group? (I'm thinking about social situations myself now as well)
now that you mention it, id say when a woman does fit in, were all so struck by it that we let her steer most of the conversation. if i had to guess, its more typical in a culture where cooperative competition is accepted.
i managed a d1 women basketball team for a season and think their dynamic was similar. teasing was shorthand because it effectively communicated difficult-to-describe concepts using an emotional memory of "that one thing so-and-so did that one time" via a nickname or reference to an action.
> Spent a lot of time in hunting and fishing parties with near constant teasing
it would be mean to target people who weren't "in on it". when someone new enters the group everyone is nice and eases them into the banter. this is what i mean when i reference an internal "jerk instance counter" when a new guy isnt nice.
teasing becomes a shared language for effective communication. "the hill where Jake crapped his pants" is a very specific location that carries an emotional hook which helps memory. cut plug is a real type of bait, but in our circle refers to a person who overdid his bait every time and well use it as short hand to tell someone not to bother gold plating.
there are lines and we all learn them as long as we start with humble intentions to help each other
This probably seems obviously true to you but it should not. Some people think there's a reasonable amount of banter, sometimes at the expense of another acquaintance, before it becomes bullying or unacceptable in the workplace.
The attributes and reasons do not matter in isolation. They will find where to poke even if you’re a twin of one of the group members. Red hair is just the obvious one to use.
The alternative is going to the office, filtering thoughts in your mouth and reporting slight misspeaks and inappropriately timed eye contacts to a special manager who then decides who’s higher in hierarchy according to some rules.
Honestly, it often will be malicious, or will quickly become malicious if you don't take it graciously. And why should you? It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.