The Wizarding World Has Plenty of Jobs
If a wizard needs a plumber, who does he call?
I ask mostly to prove a point. It’s fashionable to notice that there don’t seem to be many jobs in the wizarding world besides working at Hogwarts or the Ministry. But that assertion depends on a very limited point of view from the series, one that doesn’t imagine what the unseen parts of the wizarding world actually look like, and one that needs debunking.
So again: Imagine a wizard needs help with his plumbing. What does he do? He could fix the problem on his own with magic – if it’s a simple problem. But what if the plumbing system depends on a combination of magic and conventional Muggle pipes, and increasing the water pressure requires turning a knob – but there are five different knobs and it’s not clear which one needs to move?
Well, in that scenario, you need someone who understands the intersection of magic and plumbing. You need a wizard plumber. And when you think about it, that’s basically how the wizarding world works: For every Muggle job you can think of, there’s a wizard who does the same thing.
Retail
We know that these jobs exist; we see employees at Madam Malkin’s and Flourish and Blotts and the like. But these jobs have implications that people may not have thought about.
Take Flourish and Blotts. They sell books. To sell books, you need authors; that’s a job. You need everyone from copy editors to managing editors; those are jobs. You need designers and artists. You need a company that will ship your books in bulk, since, presumably, Flourish and Blotts isn’t getting hundreds of copies of each book delivered one at a time by owl.
And of course, you need managers and administrators, people who make sure everyone is doing their job well and getting paid and working in an environment conducive to productivity. You probably also need secretaries and assistants and researchers and fact-checkers and copywriters – lots more jobs. And, of course, there’s another big one: manufacturing, people to print the books and put them together.
Service
So let’s say you’re a secretary at a wizarding publishing house that sells books to Flourish and Blotts. You work during the day. Then you leave work and stop for some food and a drink at the pub before you get home. People work there – not just servers and bartenders, but also line cooks, since you can’t just conjure food out of thin air (Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration!).
These cooks are cooking in a kitchen – probably a commercial kitchen, since it’s a busy restaurant and everyone wants their food quickly. Can the owner of the restaurant just wave a wand and conjure a fully functioning magical commercial kitchen? I tend to doubt it. A wizard can conjure a pot or a wooden spoon, but an entire restaurant-grade kitchen requires a degree of expertise not many wizards have.
So what’s the solution? You hire someone, some sort of kitchen consultant, who comes in and, through a combination of magic and construction work, gives you the kitchen that you need. In other words, you hire someone to do their specialized job.
And this doesn’t just apply to restaurants. It could be a contractor installing a safe in a store or a projection system in a real estate office. It could be anything. And “anything” is a lot of jobs.
All in all…
I wanted to prove my point – that almost all Muggle jobs have wizarding equivalents. So I Googled “list of all jobs” and found a list of over 12,000 careers. I chose a random letter – W – and I gave a random scroll. My arrow landed on Number 81: “Waste Salvager.”
Let’s say there’s a big magical factory that makes all the Quidditch gear. They make the robes and the hats and the scarves for all the teams; they’re shipping gear to Quality Quidditch Supplies and other stores all around the country, as well as the flagship team stores at each stadium.
In the course of that manufacturing, there’s probably a bunch of fabric that gets cut and put aside. But are you just going to throw it away? Not if you can go through it and salvage usable pieces; otherwise, you’re just taking a loss on all that material. And who’s going to look through the cast-aside fabric and see what’s worth saving? A wizarding waste salvager.
That’s the point. Even when magic can solve the world’s problems, someone still needs to do the magic – which means someone needs to know how to do the magic. So when a wizard has a problem with his plumbing, who does he call? Someone who knows how to do plumbing magic. And there’s a lot of magic that needs to be done – which means there are a lot of jobs to be had in knowing how to do it.
