Jobs of Low Merit

Vintage "dust man"

Up through history there has been loads and loads of hideous jobs. Most of them also were in low merit although they, at the same time, were the most useful in making society run as smoothly as possible. Everybody may have admired intellectual workers like e.g clergymen, lawyers, artists, etc., even though they were expendable when it came to "keeping the wheels running". To get one's fingers "dirtied" by removing and disposing of garbage of all kinds has been seen as humiliating and those who had that kind of jobs had low status. Now we honor these people with yearly national garbage man appreciation days, but I doubt that it's more than a symbolic gesture.

I just love this picture of the three leaders of the WWII world, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, having to lift their feet so that the bent and worn charlady may wash the floor. This particular version - and I have seen others - has an added symbolism as her scrubbing brush is formed like a scythe .... Without her the three leaders would have to sit in the dirt and dust that heaps up without somebody like her doing their job. 

Another one who "keeps the wheels running" in a patriarchal society, is the prostitute. Hopefully her job wasn't always as awful as it seems to most of us, but she didn't exactly get honored for it. On the contrary, she got abuse and discrimination for her services: The double standard of the patriarchal society didn't leave much room for her as a citizen. The church raged and condemned her for doing what she was paid to do, and the law was against her and marked her down as a criminal which is ridiculous. In her own way she was another kind of "charlady" as the one in the Yalta drawing above. Prostitution always was a job, but somehow it became seen as a special "female sin". These women were perceived as sinners where in reality they were just business women, earning money to make the wheels of their private life turn around.

 

It's obvious that the intellectual jobs always had status, but the ones that were of a physical nature didn't although they were necessary in all societies. One may ask oneself why this is so, but I don't think there is an easy formula for this discrepancy. At this point we may only start mapping the various ideologies we have inherited from our ancestors, but as we ourselves are part of them it will be very difficult really to see what has been going on for so long.

 

https://www.waste360.com/haulers/showing-appreciation-waste-workers-national-garbage-man-day 

 

Wikipedia