Ratzenberger explained why he thought this shift happened, chalking it up to how life has simply become more convenient.
“Well, everything’s gotten easier. I mean, you know, I’ve just made myself a cup of tea and I always, you know, marvel at the fact that I can just turn this little knob and clean water comes out. Alright. There was a time when there were probably people still alive who remember that didn’t happen. You know, you’ve got to go fetch the water and there’s a well or creek or – and there was a lot of intense labor that went into everything.”
Mentioning seeing cowboys in western movies, he added, “I always marvel at the fact that every person back then had to have a lot of skills. You had to know about horses, you had to know about raising animals, best chicken feed, working with leather, a blacksmith. You know, all the skills that person had was necessary for survival.”
“So, the easier things got, and the less people need to do those things, the less things we learned,” he explained, adding that “there’s certainly a lot of helpless people wandering around today.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Ratzenberger told Fox that the dignity of skilled laborers should be “elevated” in society because of the necessary work that they do.
“I avoid the term blue collar worker and just use essential worker,” the actor said.
“They’re essential… All the upper echelon elites couldn’t function without the essential workers. You know, I mean, the subway. You’ve got people inspecting and repairing the tracks. But you know those potholes that open up every now and swallow cars and houses? [those] come from the water systems [which] are over 100 years old and are springing leaks.”
“And there’s nobody in that system that knows how to fix it,” he said, adding, “There might be three or four, but there should be three or 400, right?”
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Ratzenberger voiced Hamm” the piggy bank in “Toy Story.” (Getty Images / Getty Images)
As part of his advocacy for more labor skills, Ratzenberger told Fox that he urges universities to start classes to teach people how to fix things, like an automotive repair class, for example.
“Everybody drives a car, so why not have one class on the functioning or the basis of a car? How does it work? How was the internal combustion engine work? What are pistons? What do they do? What’s the spark plug? Where? How does – where’d it come from? It didn’t fall out of a tree. Somebody put some time and effort into inventing it.”
For individuals looking to boost their labor skills, he recommended going out and finding one of these classes. He personally recommended a “boat building class” because it teaches people a wide variety of manufacturing skills, from working the wood to setting up the electrical wiring that supplies lighting on the boat.
He urged people to take “a class at your local high school, or go to a manual arts college or a high school.”
“Just learn how to do things. It’s not hard. It’s just muscle memory,” he declared.
