As we celebrate America’s working men and women this Labor Day, we’re also aware that artificial intelligence and other new technologies are transforming the economy in which they work. Some commonplace jobs of today (remember TV repairmen?) will become obsolete tomorrow.
Below is a list of job titles that were once fairly common. See if you can guess what these folks did for a living.
1: Knocker-uppers
A: Member of the military who prepared artillery shells by “knocking” them securely into place.
B: People hired to go to workers’ doors and wake them up in time for work.
C: Farmers who specialized in animal husbandry.
Answer: B: From the Industrial Revolution into the 1920s, knocker-uppers worked as human alarm clocks, using sticks, clubs or stones to knock on clients’ windows. Sometimes, the employers would hire them to encourage timeliness from their factory workers.
2: Lectors
A: People hired to read books and news articles to factory workers as they toiled.
B: Doctors who treated people afflicted with cannibalism.
C: Members of the clergy who taught Christian tenets to new converts.
Answer: A. In Cuban cigar factories, it was common for lectors to read aloud to the workers — who were often illiterate — as they rolled cigars. Radio made the profession obsolete.
3: Rat-catchers
A: Union slang for members of organized labor who punished workers believed to be cooperating with management.
B: A Navy term for submarine spotters on destroyers.
C: People paid to catch rats.
Answer: C: Well into the 20th century, rats were such a pervasive problem, cities would hire professionals to catch and kill them and slow their spread. The Pied Piper story was inspired by reality after all. But when you make rat-catching profitable, that creates a market problem. It is thought the domesticated rat is the result of years of rat catchers breeding rodents to keep clients on the hook.
4: Pinspotters
A: Textile workers charged with keeping the “pin” on the looms cleared and sharp during fabric production.
B: Political operatives at large conventions tasked with spotting which attendees were wearing the campaign pins of their candidate’s opponents and attempting to block or misdirect them from the event.
C: People, usually young boys, hired to set up the pins for ten-pin bowling.
Answer: C. What goes down must come back up. At least in bowling. Before Gottfried Schmidt invented the mechanical pinsetter in 1936, the pinspotter or pinsetter manually put the pins back in place. Professional bowler Don Carter began his career as a pinsetter before becoming a six-time Bowler of the Year.
5: Badgers
A: People who bought produce from farms and brought it to the local open-air market to sell directly to shoppers.
B: Attorneys hired to recruit clients at delicate events like funerals or hospitals.
C: A nickname given to security guards in the post-WWII era, when the badge-wearing employees were suddenly becoming more common.
Answer: A. While people still sell goods in open-air markets, the term “badger” faded out in the United States around the Civil War. Some linguists think the term “badgering” may have come from their aggressive sales tactics.
