We like to think we're paid what we're worth when it comes to our careers. When that's not the case, we can sense it like a dog before a tornado touches down. It's especially a travesty when he job might put your life in danger. Then again, you can take to online and share it with the world.
Reddit user, u/bizlizzilzib, wanted to hear your story if your life's in danger when they asked:
What jobs are too much work or danger for what they pay?
And They Just Keep On Coming
EMTs. Criminally low pay and they have to respond to emergencies in all manner of dangerous locations.
Endless supply of aspiring do-gooders who can be burned out and turned over inside of 5 years.
Local hospital pays people like sh-t, treats them like sh-t, schedules them like sh-t, and the local community college still turns out new EMTs for them every year. No incentive to change when kids keep doing it.
Never Enough Support
Aged care.
Carers that do their backs/health in due to massive workloads and being understaffed.
Educators In The Thick Of It
Public school teachers. Especially in bad neighborhoods.
Agreed. I hate that if we protect ourselves from violent kids we are punished. I worked at a law firm years ago. I'm fully aware that kids can seriously hurt or kill people. F that noise.
Constantly In The Line Of Fire
I was a range safety officer for a couple of years and got paid $12/hr to make sure the general population tourists didn't shoot a finger off. I never went more than two weeks without a loaded firearm being negligently pointed at me.
I miss a lot of things about it, but I'm so happy to be out of there.
The 7 Dwarves Make It Look Lots Of Fun
Underground mining.
Nope. Not even for all the $ in the world. Just the thought of getting trapped under ground terrifies me.
Wait, What Happens To The Pigs?
I do occasional work on a pig farm for 10 bucks an hour. It's awful.
I'm a ranch hand too and it's a lot of manual labor but the pay is great
Tree Dangers
Line clearance tree trimming and hazardous removal
I do both for a living and I can confirm, dangerous as hell. And most companies want to pay their workers as little as they can get away with. They also tend to employ ground crew and new climbers with little to no experience. So if you are doing some dangerous removals, you gotta hope that your ground guy is paying attention and not doing stuff that can get them hurt/killed, or you hurt/killed for that matter. Drop and catching tops and chunks with an inexperienced ground person is the worst.
You Are The Bullet Shield
Armored Car Drivers and Guards.
Those guys are armed security who are at a high danger for robbery and they are making like $12 to $15 an hour.
Teenagers, Man
I used to work at a mental health hospital and mainly worked with teenagers.
They were violent, rude, and didn't behave. We occasionally got hit, shoved, cussed out, and threatened. I got $10 an hour.
The Chick Fil A here pays $14 an hour.
"Refreshments and Narcotics"
If the top answer isn't "nursing", it should be. Nothing like dealing with too little resources, ungrateful people who don't want to get better and think RN stands for "refreshments and narcotics", being thought of as doctors' servants, all for $25/hour
Danger Springs
Install/ repair of garage door springs, typically a 10-15 dollar an hour job which the torsen springs are incredibly dangerous if not dealt with correctly
Not Quite Enough
My step father works in a coke (the byproduct of coal) processing plant. 90% of the employees there get arterial cancer and have had limbs amputated as a result. The place has great health insurance. I don't think he should work there, but it's the only job he could find after being laid off from his last job.
Nowadays, Especially
surprised no one said journalist.
seems like something where you are always stressed and there are dangers with thing such as losing your job if you write something that doesnt make people happy or even losing your life. and also theres the deal of actually getting to a point where you make any money at all.
maybe no one said it bc journalists are so busy that they dont even have any time for reddit lmao
Always On Call
Probation Officer
Pay is sh-t and your caseload is super high and stressful. Can't do overtime but you gotta meet your contact standards and get everything done in under 40 hours which is impossible.
Not to mention you're dealing with people who just got released from jail/prison, have committed numerous dangerous terrible crimes and you have to visit them at their residence late hours of the night to see where they sleep.
You deal with offenders, victims, families of offenders, neighbors, roommates, state attorneys, public defenders, the works.
It's tiring.
Oh Yeah. Moose.
Treeplanting in logging clear cuts, a popular summer job in Canada.
Load up with 60-80 lbs of trees on your back and then try to climb through unstable log piles, navigate mazes of sharp pointy sticks on sometimes extremely steep/cliffy terrain with loose/duffy soil, for 10-15 cents per tree.
Also watch out for horny moose, hungry bears, wolves and very large cats.
Again. Meat Shields.
I'm currently an unarmed private security officer and I make $11 an hour.
Unarmed guards are supposed to make $15 an hour at the most but some clients like to underpay us because they don't want to pay real security money. I dont mind doing the work that I do but don't expect me to be Superman if serious shit goes down for just $11 an hour since it's too much of a hassle to pay a more respectable wage.
The Next Asbestos, You Say?
Working with carbon fiber, the stuff is the next asbestos. Ive only been there since the end of October and ive already developed a chronic cough.
This Has To Be It, Right? The Worst?
Bio-Trauma Cleanup. I made $10/hr cleaning up brain steaks from gunshot wounds, intestines from a disembowlement, liquified remains that sat for weeks, once cleaned up after a guy laid his head on a table saw in his bathroom WHILE his parents were visiting.
You don't know what walking on eggshells shells feels like til you're pulling an eyeball out of a drain pipe. That's when I realized death doesn't bother me all that much; it's the reactions of those they left behind that got me every time. It's an expensive lesson to learn for $10/hr.
...Nope. This Is It.
Basically, when police illegal imagery, *somebody* has to watch every moment of it. Usually it's a specialist in the forensics department, someone who can catalog what, specifically, is going on in the imagery. This is necessary for a couple reasons - thoroughness in building a case against the suspect, or to determine the identities of the victims in the images, or to determine what specific kinds of abuse occurred. They cannot go into court and say "your honor, we watched like half the video and it was super f-cked up". The court needs a guarantee that each video has been watched, from start to finish, by a pair of human eyes belonging to someone working with the police.
This is complicated for a few reasons, chief among them being the fact that watching sh-t like that WILL leave psychological damage, it provokes all kinds of depression, suicidal thoughts, or PTSD.
It's a literal Catch-22: you need to be sane enough to be traumatized by the imagery, and then you need to watch it to tell the rest of us how traumatic it is. I can't imagine being paid enough to watch sh-t creepier than the worst stuff.
What's the most dangerous job you can think of with the lowest pay? Tell us all about it!