A ceo leaves for a week, very few people notice.
The custodial staff leave for a day, everyone notices.
Sanitation and custodial workers deserve far more money and respect than they generally get.
I don't think people understand the degree to which society is kept alive by the labor of the least well-regarded professions. If sewage technicians and sanitation workers and their expertise and knowledge were to disappear tomorrow, the streets would pile high with bodies in every city. We live in a world where we get to be blessedly ignorant to just how fast, how brutally and how violently cholera can rip through a community. How many babies it can kill. How many elderly bodies it can devour alive. You've never seen what it's like when typhoid takes root.
"Oh but we have modern medicine" if you don't have clean drinking water and a way to dispose of your piss and shit and trash you are going to fucking die. No if or but or maybe, you are dead, and so are half the people you know.
It really is remarkable that overall, the more necessary the work, the worse society feels permitted—even obliged—to treat those who perform it.
