I spent five years on the Canadian oil patch in my thirties. Worked my ass off, 18-hour days, day after day, at times.
But man, was I fit! And exhausted beyond belief. Good thing I got out of there.
But some guys head to the patch right after high school and put in 25 years. They look like they are 60 and they are toast. Some of them, I bet if they just went home and laid down for a few weeks they would probably just die.
It is… but the catch is that the very presence of the illegals is a market-skewing force, and it affects the legal low-cost providers most of all, since they have to directly compete on price, versus the higher-priced providers, since they ostensibly have something else to differentiate themselves with. But make the price differential too high, and people tend to opt for the lower-cost provider, and that’s what seems to be happening.
As a result, plenty of people are annoyed with the idea that they’re being undercut by people who aren’t square with the law, and aren’t even from here.
One of my great-grandmas was a farm girl, got a job as a servant at age 11, then when she got married became a washerwoman. She died at a mere 89 - “mere” by comparison with two of her daughters who died at 96 (housewife, one daughter) and 98 (housewife, 14 children), and the one still going at 100 (seamstress/housewife, three daughters of which one died in childhood). She would have hated office work, but her business model involved setting her own hours and that suited her. I think that a big factor on being able to stand a certain type of work or another is the psychological factors - yes, she needed to make sure she didn’t take more work than she could handle, but she was the kind of person able of doing that; many of my coworkers don’t work anywhere near as smart as she did, they have theoretically-sedentary jobs but stress and airport food are killing them.
I guess another confounding variable would be that blue collar workers are much more likely to be smokers as well as possibly making other poor lifestyle choices. And also often not having the benefit of good ongoing health insurance/health care, in comparison to someone born into an educated, “professional” and higher income family who goes on to become educated, professional, and earning more than someone who typically does manual labour.