suzannecanthecan ?You may work long hours Lotus but unless it is relentless and grinding physical toil I don't think you can claim to be amongst the hardest of workers
YouMakeMyHeartSmile How do we define 'working hard'? I used to work 70 hour weeks in finance (for which I was paid well). It was fairly stressful work in the sense that the stakes were high. However I was sat mainly at a desk in an air conditioned office with constant access to refreshments, colleagues around to chat with if we had a spare minute etc, I wasn't down the mines or pulling a plough with my bare hands!
Are we really still stuck in the old fashioned, sexist mindset that hard manual labour is the hardest work there is? Is this not why we have at last cases which have decided that female employees doing "like work" to male employees at Manchester City Council are entitled to back pay?
I've done both - as a student, at weekends and the holidays I worked with animals, literally shovelling shit, plus handling them, which was dangerous. You get used to a certain level of physical toil after a while, its not that bad. It was certainly far less hard work than being a lawyer in a city centre private practice firm, under constant stress to meet fee targets, always be on the ball, never made a mistake, etc.. There was no downtime as with the more manual work, every single thing was really difficult mental effort at a high level, every minute of the day you are expected to be on the ball. And its a long day, and often weekends too.
I'm not saying some people don't work hard in manual jobs, but there are a lot of slackers, and we aren't in most cases describing people who actually labour in the fields (mainly done by immigrant temporary workers) or physically shovel coal - its more button pushing, interspersed with some occasional heavy lifting. People in rural jobs probably do work harder, but I don't think amount of physical effort is that a robust delineator of who works the hardest. Mental effort and taking risk can be far harder.
Trades - yes, hard manual work but also skilled, so its not simply heavy lifting or shovelling all the time. That's why we pay more for even skilled manual work. Roofing work is hard but its also precise, ditto joinery and plumbing. Painting and decorating can be pretty hard on your shoulders and back, but its not all that hard.
Maybe btl is popular because it means that people in office jobs get to use their manual labour skills to do something useful outwith the normal limits that they would otherwise be subject to? I have physically cleaned outgoing tenant's dirt that they have kindly left behind (contractors are the best, they leave places CLEAN), I have spent 5 hours on my hands and knees cleaning ingrained dirt in one kitchen floor. I've painted, tiled and grouted. DH does plumbing, although he is an office worker. I'd rather use him than someone out of Yellow Pages because he is good. The two aren't mutually exclusive!