The time needed to get $1 in international dollars is 63 minutes in the US. This is about twice the average in Germany, France and the UK according to an Oxford University researcher. This suggests that average poverty is significantly higher in the US.
I didn’t say that it is an unskilled job. But once you have the necessary certifications (which don’t take years, although you can get additional certifications over the years while doing the job), it is a risky but not especially complex job. The payment is according: good for a job like that, but not crazy level money.
And anyways, the point was that “regular workers” jobs still exists that allow you to only work a few months a year, but they have become more rare and hard to get, partially because of bureaucratic red tape.
It’s entirely missing the point because offshore scuba diving is highly skilled specialized labour. It doesn’t matter whether it’s not very complex work when you get down to it. You need years to even get access to it and it has always been like this. The “bureaucratic red tape” has only been added so that the employers can acutually assess the skill of the people they hire. It’s a field where mistakes are very, very expensive.
Maybe you’ll understand what’s wrong with your example when I present you an equally bad example: I know a guy who works two months and then spends three months scuba diving in Egypt. He’s a doctor.
Look, you don’t need to explain the details to me, as I am a scuba diver myself and have seriously considered getting into commercial diving 10-15 years ago. Hence me knowing some people that actually do this.
As I said, it is difficult to get into it and there is a lot of certificates you need to do, but at the end of the day it isn’t super difficult to do and the job itself is mainly relatively well paid because there is a certain risk involved and you spend a lot of time away from home often even cramped into small submersible habitats.
A doctor is a very bad example indeed, because most doctors have fixed jobs they can’t easily leave for longer time periods.
See, that’s the whole point. This was a discussion about people being able to live on seasonal, menial and easy to access jobs like unloading goods or waiting tables. They weren’t living very good of it, but it was possible without sleeping on the street.
So both examples show jobs that are difficult to get into with years of certification and training. Both have nothing to do with the initial point of the discussion.
Commercial scuba diving is difficult to get into but it doesn’t take many years, and for sure nowhere near as long as becoming a doctor takes.
But I get the feeling you are just trying to argue for the sake of arguing and this has long moved past the original point.
I just emphasized what the original point was and how my argument was connected to it. You just chose to ignore that.
It is completely beside the point how long it takes exactly to become a offshore scuba diver or a physician. (Where I live you need to have at least a three-year vocational education before you can start commercial diving training at all. I’d estimate it takes you about four to four and a half years all in all. Becoming a doctor takes six.) The point is that both are jobs that are difficult to get into and require specialist training. They are not “unskilled” labour, the kind ob jobs the original argument was about.