Society has loads of edge cases like this.

I broke my arm a few years back, went to hospital, and a surgeon put some titanium plates and screws in. The orthopaedic surgeon spends a lot of the day standing, they repeat similar work every day with minor variations, they can't work remotely, they're exposed to hazardous chemicals, they have face-to-face interactions with customers, they earn money by working rather than from investments or inheritance, they're union members, they get paid overtime, they wear blue employer-issued workwear, many do shift work, and they literally put in screws for a living.

And yet nobody would say surgeons are blue collar workers.

Maybe because of the $500k salaries, or the air-conditioned hospitals they work in, or because their status is equivalent to doctors who are pretty much the definition of upper-middle-class tie-wearing knowledge workers.

Very few surgeons are union members. They frequently work for outside groups and are paid per procedure. The ones that do work for the hospital on salary don’t get overtime.

>status is equivalent to doctors

They are doctors. Both in title and in function. Most surgeons only operate a couple days a week. The rest of their time they see patients in clinic, and an outside observer couldn’t tell the difference between their work environment and a primary care physician’s.

You are onto something though. My wife is an ER doctor and her job is very similar to blue collar service jobs (if you consider service jobs blue collar).

She doesn’t make her own schedule. She works insane shifts (one day she could work 7a-4p, the next 10p-7a). She interacts with patients directly all day.

The pay is a lot better, but the hours are worse than any retail job I’ve ever heard of, and you can’t call in sick. Her coworker was sick and could barely get out of bed, but she came in early to have a nurse give her an IV so she could power through her shift—that kind of thing is very common.

Plus you have the ultimate responsibility for every patient that comes through the door. You have to make sure you don’t miss anything serious every time—while at the same time, making sure that you don’t spend too much time with each patient. And the ER you’re working in is full because the floor is too full to admit new patients but the ER can’t just shut the door, so patients are boarding in the halls.

Oh and if you mess up, you can literally lose your house when a jury awards someone more than your malpractice insurance will cover.

They're not a union member the same way a teacher, police officer, or steam fitter is but they're not as far removed as your typical programmer, for example.

Powerful unions

The vast majority of doctors aren’t even members of the AMA.

As for medical specialty boards, getting board certified is much more like an engineer passing the PE exam than joining a union.

Also collective bargaining with your employer is the primary benefit of joining a union, and the primary purpose of joining a union. Without that function a union would be unrecognizable to the average union member.

And currently the AMA’s position is that congress should fund more resident slots which is the limiting factor for the number of doctors.

>precisely why doctors and lawyers get paid so much

I don’t know that regulation is precisely why. It surely contributes, but doesn’t explain all of it.

Carpenters are very rarely regulated, HVAC technicians usually are. The training required is similar. The average salary difference is less than $10k a year.

Doctor’s (and lawyer’s) salaries vary drastically by specialty, and number of doctors in a specialty doesn’t explain all or even most of the pay disparity.

There are far fewer pediatric emergency medical physicians than GI docs, but GI docs make way more money. The extra income has nothing to do with restricted supply, it’s a side effect of the way insurers pay (by procedure and GI does way more procedures).

"Exhausting work," lol.

The only people who say nonsense like this are the people who've never done manual labor for a living. I've done both and there's just no comparison of exhaustion levels.

I live on a horse farm. My day starts and ends with heavy manual labor working around animals that can kill me in an instant if they're in a bad mood or I have the misfortune to get in the middle of a beef between two of them. Most of yesterday, the temperature was in the single digits Fahrenheit with wind gusts to 50mph.

I'm also a programmer. There are some days I couldn't tell you which of the two jobs is the more exhausting.

I've also done both and each can leave me profoundly exhausted in very different ways. Neither flavor of exhaustion is worse than the other, just different.

When someone compares programing to manual labor implying that programming is more tiring or at least as tiring, yes, absolutely, 100%, it's incredibly difficult for me to respond with empathy. Impossible, even. It's clear that person has had an incredibly sheltered life.

Thanks for asking? I guess???