Lol at thinking roofing is hard... What about actually being a roof? Literally just having to lie spread out on top of someone's house 24/7, 365 days a year, getting rained on and worse. No public holidays, no maternity leave, just pure exposure to the elements all year round.

California?

Maybe these things are used on larger new-home projects, but in remodeling work, you aren't really going to be able to fit a large truck in many driveways (or streets).

Construction is generally done cheap, so if you come at a homeowner with fees for special trucks, you're going to lose the contract to someone who won't. Telling a homeowner that these are OSHA requirements will get you the "what are you talking about?" look since they are shopping around. The client doesn't give two hoots about worker safety.

Unfortunately, I know a handful of people who died or got seriously injured on the job. I once saved a guy who fell through a floor but got stuck between the studs. That would've been a 20ft drop. I've seen truly screwed up things and I've been kicked off jobs for refusing to do things that were obviously too dangerous. It's complicated, but the reality is that someone will do the truly dangerous work and no one seems to make two minds of it.

Not sure about physical strength, but had a guy come to my job to recertify us in welding.

Guy made it sound like underwater welders are clearing $100k per year easy depending on experience.

Maybe just a story, but he explained that rookies always start at lowest depth so if they **** up no one gets killed.

We do 100% residential roofing and we use them on every job we do including single-wide mobile homes, and have done so for over a decade. They are a little longer than a garbage truck. When backed up to the driveway the truck sticks out roughly the width of a normal vehicle parked.

All of the large suppliers -- ABC, Allied, Beacon (who now owns Allied), Roofline, et al. charge between $35 and $75 to drop orders with their truck. You are delusional if you think it's going to cost less than that to drive to the supply yard in your own vehicle, pick up the material, drive it to the job site, and have your crew load it on the roof. Construction isn't "done cheap" by contractors who have any idea what they're doing -- it's done at the price it takes the contractor to supply the materials the client wants/needs, cover all job costs and overhead, and make a reasonable profit. If it happens to be perceived as "cheap" by an outsider's completely uninformed opinion, great.

I'm not going to continue this conversation outside the thought that, if every contractor is using lifts, then clearly, roofing is far from being the most difficult job on a site.

you started out making no sense and went on to describe the life of pablo picasso's muses. i don't think anything listed is nearly as strenuous as sumo wrestling.

I'm a firefighter and it definitely requires short bursts of big time strength, humping hose, rescues, etc. That said I think any of the trade jobs mentioned are more physically demanding, especially without the benefit of adrenaline. Laying brick for eight hours straight would likely kill me.

Barbarian - they make you push that wheel of pain thing until you're big enough to be sold off to the fighting pits

Out of curiosity how many times a month do you respond to a structure fire? Are you volunteer or on salary?

I am not a hobbyist. Respond to, I'd say eight or so a month. Half of which end up being legit. 90% of our calls are EMS, so most of my time is spent doing paramedic stuff. Department ran >16k calls last year for a city of ~120k

Do you really refer to volunteer firefighters as hobbyists? I've heard 70% of FDs are volunteer in the US mostly small and rural areas obviously. From the few that I've met both paid and volunteer, I'd say they basically have the same skills, but the paid like to ***** about being understaffed and underfunded, while some of the volunteers are more passionate. I don't have anything invested in either side except tax money, but I hate paid firefighters bitching about their pay.

It's a relatively safe and very well paying job for the non-hobbyists and idiots heap praise on them as being heroes. So I'd put that in a cushy non-physical category.

txdome with an incredibly bad take.

They get paid 4 times the amount of EMT for basically doing the same job, retire at 55 with a pension, and still ***** non-stop about funding.

Volunteers are necessary. They are also hobbyists. In my experience the level of training between paid and volunteer departments is not close to the same, and understandably so. Volunteers are almost certainly more passionate...most people are more passionate about their hobbies than their 9-5s.

I don't have any complaints about my pay. Cushy isn't how I'd describe the job, but it has its moments!

We had a LOD death in a neighboring community last week with another still in critical condition. **** happens, fighting fires is dangerous. Cancer is the bigger issue though.

Anyway, enough derail. There are lots of threads in politics forum where you can go to bash unions if you feel like it.

Firefighters do cool stuff like help old people who can't get up. That may sound sarcastic, but it's genuine. Toward the end of his life my dad had help several times when neither my brothers or I were around. Thanks for the stuff like that, not just putting out fires.

being a laborer who works for a bricklayer could be the absolute worst here. You dont have to lift some single crazy heavy object, but all you do is mix mortar, hump the mortar, and carry bricks, with plenty of lifting both of those over your head, and if you are just the laborer you dont get the reprieve of laying bricks

Saturation Diver