Jobs for Giants in modern society

Question

Me Gam. Me Giant. Me not very smart but me need food. Me need to find job.

In my world Giants are a thing. And they need to eat too. In fact, they need way more food than most of us. Therefore, they need a job to make money and buy food.

First here are some specs on my Giants :

• The Majority of males are about 4m50 (14'9'') in height, while females are smaller at 4m20 (13'9''). They weight approximatively 900kg (~2000 lbs).
• They are stronger and bulkier than humans. A fit giant can lift about twice his weight.
• They live up to about 60 years.
• They need about 10 times more food than a regular human.
• They are somewhat dumb. They find it hard to do complex maths, but they can still read and write.
• They are somewhat rare. Their total population is about 5'000'000 in the whole world.
  • They appeared 10 years ago in Russia, most of them still live there.

I don't really know how much money they'd need to survive and at first glance, I can't seem to think they'd be able to survive in our current society.

So here are my questions:

If Giants were to take part in our modern society rather than living an isolated life: What job would they do? Would they be able to get by financially?

Answer 1

First of all, I'm going to assume the following about your giants' intelligence:

1. They are literate, but lack the ability to use correct grammar and have a limited vocabulary.
2. They cannot perform maths to a level above basic addition and times tables.
3. Due to this they may be socially awkward with humans, or looked down upon for their apparent stupidity.

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So, what jobs can we give them?

Let's go through some different areas:

Media

Writing, journalism, and presenting on TV are out of the question, however roles as actors would be available to them but only for specific roles as giants.

Shop working

Stacking shelves and working the checkout are viable options, since they require only simple interactions with people. We assume that shops have aisles and checkouts big enough for the giants to fit in, of course.

Serving at the counter in fast food restaurants would also be an option, however I doubt a giant would be a very good waiter, since that involves words and discussions about the food and drinks menus.

Emergency services

While health work is out of the question, giants may be useful for the fire services, or for riot control in the police department (especially if the rioters are other giants).

Transport

I don't think we'll be seeing any giant pilots, however some modes of transport are very simple to operate. A tram perhaps? If your giants can drive, they could serve as bus drivers and lorry drivers too.

Construction and similar industries

Probably the most obvious option. Giants could be handy in lifting stuff or operating machinery. Mining would be another big one for the giants, with their strength being handy for this kind of work.

Arts and textiles

Perhaps some of your giants are good painters, sculptors, or creators? Maybe some giants have skill in textiles or sewing? The clothes industry often includes repetitive tasks which can be learnt.

Food production and farming

While being a fully qualified chef might not be the most likely option, consider factories that mass produce foods. Some of these use workers since machinery cannot perform the tasks they want. The giants could make sandwiches, pack salads, pick fruits (no need for a cherry picker!), harvest grains, and do all sorts of jobs on the farm. Looking after sheep, cows, chickens, and other livestock does not necessarily require a degree.

Sports

While mixing giants with humans may lead to catastrophe, there could realistically be leagues in giant-sports. Their strength would be something amazing for people to witness and things like wrestling, boxing, and martial arts could be popular among giants. Also consider team sports and athletics. There may even be a Giant Olympics (or equivalent) and various world leagues available for professional sportsgiants.

Community service

Stupid giants could easily work at recycling centres, or as bin collectors. Cleaning the streets and public areas would be a simple job for them.

Teaching

No! I hear you say! A stupid giant could never be a teacher! But who is going to teach the giants? Would giant children go to the same schools as human children, or to giant schools? Would those schools have human or giant teachers? Perhaps the more intelligent (or less stupid) giants could aspire to teach the next generation.

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So there you have it. There's a lot of jobs out there...

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Are these jobs well-paid?

Well.... no.

Realistically, these giants would not make as much money as a more intelligent human. Due to them eating more, they would need to spend more on food. This is a bad combination. They are also very tall, making housing much larger for them and more expensive. They would also need bigger clothes, costing more money.

To be honest, I think that your giants would struggle to get by.

Answer 2

From personal experience, there's at least one field where an extremely tall and strong human is uniquely qualified.

Warehouses

You've speculated 14 Foot tall (Let's just say 20-foot vertical reach) humans that can lift thousands of pounds. Basically, you're talking about human forklifts.

These giants could shift around pallets as a server would bus plates between tables. They'd arguably be better than forklifts because a giant needs no special training to use its own body, nor does it need an expensive service contract to keep it maintained.

But are they well paid?

Well.... Depends. You can find entry-level forklift operator openings anywhere between 12 and 25 per hour. Not exactly six figures, but a giant could be able to afford food if little else. That said, since the company is saving on the cost of maintaining forklifts the giants might be significantly better paid.

Answer 3

Nursing assistants. Maybe full Nurses for the very smartest ones.

Their capacity to handle fully grown humans bearing the weight easily is the key qualification. Example activities:

• Containing non-cooperative patients without hurting them.

• Carrying the unconscious or those who otherwise can't move themselves, gently but swiftly.

Compares to how normal humans deal with toddlers.

Answer 4

One information, that you omitted, is very crucial to their purpose. Are they omnivores or herbivores. Because you see, no one would keep mule or ox if they would need to eat meat (even from time to time). The price of food would not be equivalent to work they can do (we keep flesh eating humans around because they are capable of precision and thinking, from time to time).

Second thing is easy calculation. Giant weighting 900kg can lift twice his weight 1800kg. But they eat 10 times more than human. Who in turn can lift around 70kg. So 10 men can lift 700kg.

So we see that one giant can lift more than 20 men. So anywhere where physical labour is needed they would fit. Construction, industry, maybe some disasters strike force?

Answer 5

The giants eat 10 times a human. So 30,000 calories a day. The most efficient calories per dollar foods give 3,000-4,000 calories per dollar. So a giant can eat on $10 a day. They can afford to feed themselves on just about any job in an advanced country. Their best fit though would be manual labor in less advanced countries where they can cheaply replace expensive machines.

An alternative high end job? NASCAR pit crew.

http://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/

Answer 6

The "modern society" is considered advanced mainly due to the shift from manual and repetitive manual labour to more creative and demanding jobs usually requiring education.

Your giants could, in a way, symbolize problems of today's poor, uneducated class. In many countries, especially young democracies of the Central and Eastern Europe, the society polarizes into well-educated white-collar workers, who were the main benefitors of political changes and poor, conservative men, often unemployed or carrying out manual jobs. The second group often walks down the crime path, becoming violent hooligans or small-time bandits and robbers.

That's sadly your giants fate. They would end up as circus attraction, manual workers and bouncers. However, due to the small earnings in such jobs and their high food demand, most of them would start grouping up in organised crime, robbing and murdering wealthier people, possibly even with some humans leading them as "the brains".

Couple of years later and a sight of the giant would inevitably mean trouble. Some men could even start hunting them, possibly blaming the giants for all the problems they have. Without the support of the governments, they will be either be killed one by one or organize a closed society to defend themselves.

So in the end the only option for them as the group is to gather and create their own societies. Would you have much less of them globally, let's say 50 000, it would be possible for them to become some kind of symbol for the wealth and power, with rich people having them as bodyguards and private armies. But 5 million is a bit to much for that, so sadly, they would either gather up or go extinct.

Answer 7

Military or police services.

I'm surprised no one mentioned this.

Take the 20mm cannon from an A-10 Warthog and fit it with a stock, trigger and backpack for the ammo belt.

Give them a shield, the 20mm and point them at the enemy. Maybe also give them an axe or pick so they can deal with nearby armored vehicles.

I suspect that many IEDs will simply make an armored giant mad.

Answer 8

Guinea pigs and slaves

What do we have here? On the one hand, not very intelligent and dangerous to the civilians barbarians. I'm pretty sure that, despite all the civil rights' activists' efforts, those giants won't get equal rights to humans for many decades. Not only that, but their movement in cities would be heavily regulated, if not outright outlawed. And considering that even human slavery still encompasses millions of people, those giants would be used as cheaper and more efficient labour with no hesitation (especially in Russia). They would be lucky just to get enough to eat, never mind seeing any money.

On the other hand, they clearly posses some "magic" in their bodies, that makes them not only survive, but invert the square-cubic law. That would make many biologists around the world very interested in dissecting and examining giants. Again, depending on a laboratory that captured a giant, they would be lucky to just survive and be fed.

Answer 9

There's some wild terrain that I think a giant could walk in more easily than a human can: e.g. temperate forest, with space between trees but with undergrowth and fallen trees. That's hard for a human, hard for a wheeled or tracked vehicle (except by clearing paths), hard for a flying drone.

I think they should be employed as shepherds or game-wardens, for endangered (and seemingly dangerous) species in their natural habitat: rhinos, tigers, bears, gorillas, etc.

Answer 10

On the question of replacing medium machinery (like forklifts), five giants would replace five humans and a never-breaking forklift, not five humans and five forklifts.

As you increase the size, the power you need to move, for example, grows by the cube of the size (due to increased volume and so weight). However, surface heat loss only grows by the square.

As such, giants would be much less adaptable in hot climates than normal humans (this works by reverse on cold climates though).

However, due to the higher increase in weight compared to the increase in surface, they would be better to work in high wind conditions. As such, I would propose the giants for work on oil rigs, oil derricks, sea-based oil-extraction platform, ships (in some roles)

As for machinery working in very bad conditions, I read an article about replacing equipment at mobile phone towers and using horses on the last mile (where even 4x4 pickup trucks couldn't go due to mud).

Also, you could use them as artillery men (loaders for heavy artillery or MLRS).

Answer 11

I'd say #1 would be media, I think that's been covered.

Second though I wouldn't go for military (Bigger isn't always better there) but I'd say bodyguard would be excellent. This should also pay pretty well.

Construction--they would be able to work much more quickly than quite a few more traditionally sized humans--especially once we came up with tools & procedures fitted to them. This could apply to any physical labor that needed speed and precision (Cranes would be comparatively slow)

Athlete--Unless we created (Racist?) laws against them how long until they absolutely dominated football teams? Basketball would become a joke. Pro Wrestling?

A Farmer that didn't need machinery... A Sea diver/salvager that could practically wade out to sea. A Reality show extra (Imagine what those guys looking for gold on that island could do with one)... A Sex worker (Yes, it would happen!)

Most of these would pay quite well I'd think.

Answer 12

Any construction-related company worth their salt would have a giant or two on their payroll.

When I was a kid, one of my friends moved to a new place. His parents had a really heavy antique desk (1 by 2 meters, solid oak, with drawers and everything) on the second (third in US) floor of their old house that they wanted to move to the new house. (It came with the house when they moved in, they had no clue how it got there.)
This desk was way too heavy to get down the stairs. So they hired a crane to lift it off of the balcony, but the crane wasn't able to get to the back of the house because the ground was too soggy and uneven and it was too narrow for those big metal plates. They ended cutting out part of the roof and attic, some exterior wall and a window to lift the thing out.
A giant wouldn't have cared about uneven or soggy ground and just carried the desk from the balcony to the truck.

Another time I was doing helping lay a few pipes and build a wall for some volunteer work for school. Everything went fine until we hit a small rock that was right where a pipe needed to go, for some reason this small rock wouldn't budge. As we dug it out it turned out that this small rock was actually a small bump on a much larger boulder, with a lot of effort we could rock it a little, but there was no way we were going to lift it out without a crane. As hiring a crane was very expensive and time consuming, over the course of that day we removed all the pipes we'd laid the previous day, and the next day we laid all those pipes again.
A giant would have just lifted out the boulder and put it somewhere else. A giant would probably also have laid all those pipes in an hour in the first place.

Many companies specializing in construction, plumbing, moving, etc. often encounter problems that wouldn't be a problem at all if one person could just lift it into place.
Now they solve these problems by getting a crane to wherever their problem is, if it can even get there. If not, they have to get some hydraulic jack system up, they have to get people with special training. This takes days. A giant, being able to lift well over a tonne, can probably solve half of these problems within an hour. (The other half would be too heavy even for a giant, or be in too tight a space.)

If a giant is too stupid to figure out how to fix it on his own, just have his supervisor tell him what to do. Even the stupidest giant is smarter than a forklift or a crane. So just train someone else to be the giant's buddy, and you got yourself an all-terrain general purpose forklift/crane/power wrench/power hammer. Much like dogs that search for drugs, help in rescue, etc. have a handler.

To name some jobs where a giant could assist: Plumber, construction worker, search and rescue team, piano mover, mover, landscaper, carpenter, security, healthcare (lifting people), whelder, iron worker, luggage handler, car mechanic...

Answer 13

"Ethnic" restaurants

Giants may not be smart enough to handle the business red tape, but they'd be smart enough to handle cooking and being waiters.

Giants probably have their own culture and cuisine. Even if they don't, they could take Russian cuisine and pass it off as Giant cuisine. Or someone could totally make something up - Chinese cuisine in western countries only has a vague connection with Chinese cuisine in Chinese countries, and "Mongolian BBQ" has nothing to do with Mongolian cuisine!

Living Expenses

If you want a mildly distopian world, giants may save on food by eating food that is only fit for animals but not fit for human consumption. This could be justified if their digestive system is more robust than humans'.

To be honest, I'd see housing and transportation as the biggest difficulties. Could they fit in a normal bedroom, or even a lounge room? How would they cook or wash themselves? Would they have to live in some sort of shanty town?

Also, could they drive their own car or ride in human public transport, or would they have to ride in the back of a ute or a truck?

Answer 14

Giants are typically hired for an jobs where physical strength is a huge asset and intellectual prowess isn't really that important.

For example, giants typically are employed as construction workers or miners. However, they can also be used for some of the more physically challenging tasks in eg. farming or warehouse management.

Last but not least, they're also very useful as ground troops in military combat.

Answer 15

Aside from the answers like military and crowd control, their strength can be used like a power source.

Giant Powered Transportation

Instead of having to use fossil fuels or electricity to run the metro or trams, you could instead use the giant's immense strength to your advantage. You can create a mechanism that converts their arm strength into kinetic energy to make the train move. They could possibly become exhausted, so swapping giants between train stops would be necessary. A conductor may be required as working and knowing when to stop would be too much work.

Demolition

If a house needs to be demolished, give a giant some protective gear and they can demolish a house without the need of machinery.