Musings, from a longtime friend and CBN Board member
I retired and moved to Oregon about three years ago... the new routine has given me time to reflect and reconsider what I thought I knew... and sometimes to just confirm some things.
Take work for instance. You could look at job titles, or you can look at work activity... that is what actions are being done, how, and where, and perhaps most importantly, why it's being done in a specific way.
Let's look at the job called 'janitor'.
Forty-five years ago I was stripping floors, mopping floors, dusting desks and flat surfaces... cleaning ashtrays. Yep, people used to smoke in the office, and as a result, every janitor had four rags, a clean and more dry than not 'window rag', a regular 'wet rag', hopefully it was clean, a 'polishing rag' treated more often than not with lemon scented furniture polish, and a dirtier than sin 'ashtray rag'. I had to wash my hands for several minutes after a cleaning shift to get the cigarette tar out of my hands, as it would really kill the appetite when I picked up a slice of pizza, to only get a whiff of a dirty ashtray from my own hand.
Here's another, I remember stripping old yellow wax off of 9 inch square vinyl asbestos, 'VA', tile floors with a mixture of ammonia and hot water, then neutralizing the floor with vinegar and cold water, before applying a fresh coat of wax. So much has changed.
Dust? We used feather dusters in the old days, ostrich feathers were considered the best, and later we started spraying our feather dusters with a chemical that we thought would hold the dust... it didn't really work. We were only moving the dust around, or worse putting it into the air, then breathing it in. Today, we wipe a surface with a treated microfiber cloth that is designed to pick up and remove dust from the room.
The same can be said for daily floor care. We used to vacuum a carpet with machines that exhausted fine dust particles in the air; and we would 'wet mop' a hard surface floor with soap and water, leaving a fine film haze as often as not. Now we damp clean a hard floor with a special microfiber floor tool... in most cases it works faster and does a much better job than a wet mop, as it cleans the floor surface leaving no strings or streaks.
I could go on, however the point is that while some job titles may be the same as fifty years ago, the activity, tools and techniques can be very different. It could be argued that some jobs are entirely new ones, as the work has very little in common with the same job titles of fifty, or a hundred years ago.
Here's an article about what jobs were most common in Oregon in 1870, as compared to 2020. Although, without the details of how and why a job was done, I'm not so sure that it tells us as much as we might think it does. Think livery stable... parking garage... and ride share apps.
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2022/04/the-10-most-common-jobs-in-oregon-in-1870-and-2020.html