This spiel is out of character pretty badly I think. While her mom was a professor, this is a shockingly ignorant attitude for someone with her life experiences. The people that legitimately believe this understand exactly nothing about skilled trades, and this attitude mostly comes from incompetent public school teachers that live the "those that can't do, teach" slogan. This attitude has actually caused a massive problem in some developed countries where skilled trade costs are skyrocketing because people think "hurr dumb labor work is for peasants" and don't go into them. And dockworkers would likely be far more than just laborers.
I hope this is genuinely just a mistake of character and not author bleedthrough, because Taylor doesn't seem like the type to go off on "wage slave" ranting, let alone conflate corporate drone shit with blue collar work, when they're very different. That kind of ignorance typically comes from the spoiled upper class "savior of the working class" that has never lifted a hammer for an honest days' work in their life, and she comes from a poorer background than that.
"Boring, menial labor" should be exactly what it sounds like: unskilled labor. Anything that can't be automated but doesn't require much brain power. It very much
is the sort of thing people always tell their kids they need to escape by getting an education, and there definitely
are people who do that work anyways because they find it fulfilling and worth doing. You can bet the dockworkers she grew up around definitely had people like that among them, and those people especially would have had a harder time finding legitimate work when the shipping jobs dried up and the ferry shut down.
But you're also right that skilled labor also tends to be looked down upon by white collar folks and upper middle class. While not all trades will have skills applicable outside of the shipping industry, however, a plumber can be a plumber just about anywhere, and so can an electrician. I think that, given how much the DWU is indicated to be struggling with finding legitimate work, to the point where the members are starting to sign up as henchmen for the local supervillains, it's far more likely that these are mostly people who are generally considered unskilled laborers. Even if they're certified to operate a crane or a forklift or what have you, that's really not a skill that translates to work outside of the docks and the shipping industry.
I didn't want to get into particularly biting social commentary, however, so —
Yeah, the other thing that seemed off was Taylor's whole thing around slavery and so on; she's both fully and personally aware that slavery was literally still practised in the modern day of her world (including by people she worked for against people she cared about *cough*Coil*cough*) and was raised by a professor who was an extremist feminist activist and a Union guy. She's more likely to start spouting Marx as interpreted through second-and-third-wave feminism at people than downplay the wage slave thing.
I get why she's not rocking the boat as she's literally in the past and is in no position to fight against or change things, but that bit did feel very 'upper middle class kid who's literally never been exposed to anything about reality' as opposed to 'young woman who's been involved in law enforcement or supervillainy for most of her adult life'. Taylor knows full well that there are slaves in every country in the world, still, today. She's almost certainly busted people who traffic them. Hell, Mash is one.
She wouldn't be going in on weaksauce 'ooh wage slavery' when she'd have a solid education in actual communist/socialist/whatever and feminist theory from her parents, full knowledge of modern slavery, and when she literally works with someone that is functionally enslaved by Chaldea.
That section goes the way it does for a couple of reasons. One of them was that I didn't want to get too far off into a tangent about that stuff, but I did want her to throw in some narrative commentary about how even the world the twins live in, modern as it is, isn't as rosy as they think it is. Another is that I didn't want to get
too political, so I tried to keep it down to something most of the readership could definitely agree on.
You're absolutely right that Taylor is about as far left as she can get. The editing team and I actually talked about that. But Wildbow tends to steer away from politics in his works, with the most biting commentary being about how systems created by men are inherently prone to corruption. Again, though, I didn't want to start a big political debate in the comments, so I tried not to touch too deeply on it. If the section suffered for it, well, I could
try to fix it, but I'm not willing to touch it if I can't find a way to straddle that line without getting a citation for bringing in politics.
