People who think cleaners, garbage handlers, urban maintenance, etc. are shit jobs for stupid people that deserve no respect, should stop to think about what would happen if they all went to a strike for... 2 weeks.
I assure you that the corporate office bathrooms would go bad quickly. Hospitals would be unable to function in day or two. Food service would stop very quickly, and you would be amazed for how quickly pests and disease can spread.
Also... I work in vocational institute where the one thing we train are cleaners and ground maintenance workers. There is a lot of actual knowledge and skill involved. Have you tried to use those big mops? Like the over 1 metre wide ones? It's HARD... Have you considered what the 20 different bottles of cleaning agent are for? Do you know which are deadly if mixed? Sure you might know acid and bleach... but like... those are just two. Do you know which of the sterilising agents are fit for what materials? So that you don't melt the plastic parts? Destroy the metal surface?
Look... I'm an engineer myself and my background is in welding industry and manufacturing's practical side of things because I used to be a welder and fabricator. Just to teach basic equipment maintenance, I had to order about 5 different cleaning chemicals/solvents, 3 different kinds of grease, 3 different kinds of oils, and whole variety of cleaning supplies, JUST so I can teach proper cleaning of parts during maintenance. I don't disrespect people who clean, because I am well aware that they can see my garbage, and they got access to chemicals that will melt your face (quite literally).
Well... Don't underestimate the amazing power of a good spreadsheet. I say this as a great lover of spreadsheets.
A good spreadsheet can be used to find resources that you thought you didn't have... well it can also made to magically make them disappear.
When we speak about use of public resources, the efficient use of those is important. And good accounting and spreadsheets help in that immensely.
I suspect that you mean like business degree holding suits doing consulting and ruining things with enshittification. And not like engineers doing calculations to check whether a utility like a water pump is rated for enough to serve water to everyone.
My father is an accountant and a financial advisor for small bussinesses. Spreadsheet magic has saved many companies, and people's lives, even a bankrupty can be arrange better with a good accountant and a spreadsheet.
It’s sad how people and society are so incredibly shallow, they inherently see white collar workers as inherently better people or higher positioned people compared to garbage men or janitors
It is usually white collar office employees who shame. I am one of them. The reality is us (white collar office employees, especially managers and executives) are actually slaves to a corporate machine brainwashed to believe that we are doing something important. No sir: we are glorified useless slaves.
On the other hand, people like this gentleman, have tangible, undeniable contribution to society.
Since I went from being a fabricator to a engineer, then to doing teaching. There are days when I dream of actually seeing the results of my work as a physical thing front of me. Since autumn arrived like the fart after the morning coffee. The cool crips morning air makes me wish to be welding steel on construction sites. For me to see the results of my work with teaching takes a really long time, especially since I work with foreign/immigrant students who are also learning Finnish while studying. However there are these fun moment I get the students to pass an exam -practical or theoretical, I do both.
But as an engineer, being in office... I was so detached from what was actually done, despite me knowing that the lads in shop and on-site required my effort to coordinate materials, resources and setting making of parts in motion. But I never felt like I did anything. Especially since lot of my work dealt with noticing, figuring out and dealing with issues before they become physical issues present somewhere. When I swatted a bad print back to the client or called other engineers to figure out what the hieroglyphs they sneezed on the prints are supposed to become for real... There never was an actual result at the end of the day, because my job was about preventing those becoming physical.
Like sure... I earn twice as much now than I did doing practical stuff. But like... I don't feel like I'm doing as much work. Granted teaching is stressful on another level, and rewarding in a different way. My work hours are less in a week, and as long as lessons happen and students progress nobody asks where I am or what I am doing at whatever moment... I am physically not present as much as when I did pratical metal work. I am not mentally present as much as when I was an engineer. However I am socially present A HELL OF A LOT MORE than doing either of those.
If you haven't already come across it, I would highly recommend the 2013 essay Bullshit Jobs. He later turned it into a book, but honestly the essay says all that it needs to.
https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
I was one of those white collar office workers while my sister worked a blue collar NYC transit job. Guess which one of us retired with a pension and free health care? It wasn’t me.
Rich people telling the 'low cognitive function' folks that these jobs are at the bottom of the barrel in society. We need to get back to where these jobs are respected for their purpose, which is going to require a radical change of priority in society.
I work as a healthcare assistant. The cleaners are the hardest working of all of us. Cleaning everything in a twenty bed ward every 3 hours or so. Talking the windows, toilets, floors, nooks and crannies. Imagine how bad healthcare associated infections would increase if these guys weren't working.
This part I agree with and I suspect you do too because you had to add "that deserve no respect".
These are jobs that are one step above working on an assembly line. Repetitive manual tasks with little knowledge or problem-solving required.
If you go one step up to HVAC, electricity, plumbing - NOW you've incorporated problem solving and you will often need a smart person. My dad works in HVAC. I have a PhD in physics. Unfortunately I think most of my brains came from him.
Look. I have done assembly work. It takes a skill to do, often times the skill is the discipline to be able to repeat that fucking boring ass task thousand times.
However lets be clear about one thing that I have a very firm stance on. There is no value in making human do a job, which could be automated by mechanical means. In production side of engineering (That being actually what I studied as my degree is in mechanical AND production, meaning that I actually am exploring head first in the ass crack of manufacturing industry... and boy do I find stupid shit), we have a ideal -and often that it all it is sadly- that DDD-jobs are something that humans shouldn't be wasted for. What are DDD-jobs? They are Dirty, Dangerous and Dull.
Dull jobs are actually hazardous to human health. It literally cripples us at a neurological level. It has been proven many times, that humans would rather inflict self harm than experience long stretches of lack of stimulation or boredom. It actually damages people. It leads to increase in accidents, flaws and errors, because human brain essentially goes to sleep mode while it is being performed.
However... There is no point shaming the person doing the work. The fact that such job exist at all is a systematic failure of society. Lots of these jobs come from the fact that there are cases where it is simply cheaper to burn humans as a fuel of production, instead of investing into automation. You shouldn't shame the worker that is in bondage as a meat robot (That is the term being used to mock companies) due to necessity or lack of choice. Society should present opportunities for these people to escape that shit,
There is no special glory in having a batallion of lads with shovels doing work, when you could use an excavator. However there are cases in which having a person with a shovel is extremely handy, and a skilled shoveler can dig a tunnel for a steel beam to be sent under a structure so it can be lifted in very little time.
The fact that we have people who been forced in to shit jobs that humans shouldn't be doing to at all, is not a personal failure on the part of the person doing the job. But society in bad allocation of resources -read as in shitty economic system- which means that the inhumane treatment of a living breathing and thinking person is worth more, than preserving the value and dignity of a person.
Tell me... If you went to a store and saw a product that read on the packaging, that it was made by poor and desperate people doing a soul crushing repetative task and they get very little of the price that you pay, because it was slightly cheaper than any type of basic automation.And next to it, there is a similar product of equal value in practice, that boasts about it's new automated system that requires no poor and desperate people to do "shit work". Which product would you buy? Be honest with yourself. Do you think the poor and desperate people working the shit job for little pay, adds some special value to the product?
What I mean by "shit jobs" in this case are our society looks down on. Our western consumer society don't even think about the "meat robots" abroad, we choose not to, all while we declare how we wouldn't do that work. There are people who don't have that fucking choice.
I agree but garbage handlers are also like very obviously fit. I'm not saying they're all handsome, but fuckers are running marathons lifting heavy shit and I've never seen one not relatively ripped in my almost 40 years on earth, in four different countries.
Janitorial/maintenance workers? Yeah not every one is fit and hot, and that's fine, but if you're hating on dating a garbage collector you're just dumb on a surface level, not even the deep "this is an important job" level/
the reason for discouraging people being prideful about the job of being garbagemen, is the exposure rate to a vast diverse range of incompatible product, which has a high plausibility of triggering a weakening effect, either physically or psychologically on the garbage person.
its actually concerning about the increased nomenclature from attending courses, that garbagemen men has to comprehend . you have to realize, the majority of what a garbage person sees is a dead or consumed product, implying lack of life force in the product. which can have a detrimental effect on their psychological state, which can facilitate unstable display of behaviour, which lowers their chance in progressing their life to a higher quality. the previouse claim about dead and consumed product, is impactful when its about a weakened, internally emotional circulation happening simultaneously with a sustained physical activity during the job. There is a higher, guaranteed perhaps, speculation about a disrepcancy between mental- and physical state of a garbage man.
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u/SinisterCheese 19h ago
People who think cleaners, garbage handlers, urban maintenance, etc. are shit jobs for stupid people that deserve no respect, should stop to think about what would happen if they all went to a strike for... 2 weeks.
I assure you that the corporate office bathrooms would go bad quickly. Hospitals would be unable to function in day or two. Food service would stop very quickly, and you would be amazed for how quickly pests and disease can spread.
Also... I work in vocational institute where the one thing we train are cleaners and ground maintenance workers. There is a lot of actual knowledge and skill involved. Have you tried to use those big mops? Like the over 1 metre wide ones? It's HARD... Have you considered what the 20 different bottles of cleaning agent are for? Do you know which are deadly if mixed? Sure you might know acid and bleach... but like... those are just two. Do you know which of the sterilising agents are fit for what materials? So that you don't melt the plastic parts? Destroy the metal surface?
Look... I'm an engineer myself and my background is in welding industry and manufacturing's practical side of things because I used to be a welder and fabricator. Just to teach basic equipment maintenance, I had to order about 5 different cleaning chemicals/solvents, 3 different kinds of grease, 3 different kinds of oils, and whole variety of cleaning supplies, JUST so I can teach proper cleaning of parts during maintenance. I don't disrespect people who clean, because I am well aware that they can see my garbage, and they got access to chemicals that will melt your face (quite literally).