The value of "dirty jobs"

Excerpts from an interview with Mike Rowe, who hosts the Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs."

MIKE ROWE: Attitudes toward hard work have changed, and not for the better. Many people view dirty jobbers with a mix of pity and derision. Some ignore them altogether. However, one thing is unchanged: People with dirty jobs make civilized life possible for the rest of us. For that reason, I see a willingness to get dirty as a mark of character.

G: Why don’t more people respect dirty jobs?

MR: Once upon a time, we were proud to be dirty. Dirt looked like work, and work was revered. Now, we’ve redefined our notion of what a “good job” looks like. We’ve taken the “dirt” out of the formula, and in the process, marginalized a long list of important professions. Big mistake...

G: So you’re anti-college?

MR: No. But a four-year degree is not the only way to acquire useful knowledge. Trade schools, apprenticeships, community colleges, on-the-job training, the kind of learning we dismiss as “alternative education,” is every bit as viable as a traditional sheepskin diploma. Maybe more so. And a hell of a lot cheaper. We need to stop promoting one form of education at the expense of another. It’s stupid...

We’ve been gradually training our kids to equate dirt with vocational dissatisfaction. The real enemies of job satisfaction are drudgery and boredom, and those can be found just as readily in cubicles as they can in ditches...

There is nothing wrong with getting a college degree. The flaw in our character is our insistence on separating blue-collar jobs from white-collar jobs, and encouraging one form of education over another. Why do we value one above the other, when our future depends upon both? That’s our blind spot. 

My own dirtiest jobs were greasing cooker machines in a Green Giant canning plant, and cleaning bedpans (and buttocks) as an orderly.  After that I spent many years teaching in the technical institute affiliated with the University of Kentucky, and I can guarantee you that the students there went on to careers just as satisfying and probably just as well-paying as most of their counterparts in the four-year degree program.

Via Reddit, where there is a long discussion thread about the value of college and of manual labor.