There are large amounts of cultural and career inertia that you have to overcome to 'pivot' your career towards something wildly different. Not everyone can pivot towards something better especially as times change, education changes and people change. My father never graduated highschool and for him, fishing paid better than other opportunities. It was the same for my step-father.
It was also all that they knew how to do. There were few retraining programs (that they couldn't afford even if they could) and to them, their career was their life. Their friends did it, their parents did it. It was their entire identity.
What I'm doing is effectively the pivot away from the family career. It doesn't change the fact that it left a generation in the dust.
Is it possible wages often don’t reflect the value of the work people do?
No. The human society would not collapse if there were fewer fishermen. The fact that the fishermen are so badly paid even if they work so hard, to me is a clear indication that the human society does not value their effort and it would be probably better if they would put their efforts into something else.
>>Is it possible wages often don’t reflect the value of the work people do?
I agree, there is often little correlation between the wage and the value of the work but the rational workers should optimize for the wage not for the value of the work if they don't want to be poor.
The immediate alternative that came to my mind is trucking. I have a relative who pivoted from factory work into trucking and working with heavy machinery in his 50's, after the factory jobs dried up. Though he definitely had hard times, it is certainly doable and beats dying or getting crippled working for pennies.
Though far from a cushy job, trucking seems comparable to fishing (e.g. you're away from home for a long periods, doesn't require much education) without the danger and backbreaking nature of the work.