Hard Work

It surprises me that people are being so hateful about the garbage collectors' compensation in particular, because being a garbage man is Hard Work. It's physical labour outside in the elements, it's dirty and smelly, there's probably bugs. They shower after work, not before. They have enough callouses on their hands that they hold their Tim Hortons cup by wrapping their hand around it (rather than thumb on top and fingers on the bottom like us office workers). It's real, honest, hard work. The kind of stuff that Builds Character. It's practically a Canadian value - you do Real Honest Hard Work and you support your family on it. Nothing fancy, but perhaps a small postwar bungalow (rented if you're in the city), a roast on Sundays, and skates under the xmas tree. That's almost universally considered a Good Thing.

Suppose I wrote a story about my family and the jobs we've had and the what we did with the money we made. I'd start out by telling you about my grandparents worked in coke ovens and meat packing plants - dirty, smelly, unpleasant work, Real Honest Hard Work - to support their gaggles of children. Then I'd tell you about how my parents worked in the same coke ovens and meat packing plants to put themselves through university, then got white-collar jobs in offices and classrooms and used that salary to buy a house in the suburbs where each kid could have their own bedroom and we could have a car and there were vacations almost every summer. Then I'd tell you about how in my generation our jobs were more of the cash register type - be perky and look pretty for the customers - and didn't contribute as much to our tuition as our scholarships and our parents' money did. Then we finished university and went straight into professional jobs that support our habits of specialty hair products and more shoes than strictly necessary.

If you were having any judgmental thoughts while reading that story, if you were to present anyone in that story as superior to anyone else, it would be the grandparents. Because they're the ones doing Hard Work, Real Work. Their work is the kind being alluded to when trying to sell us beer or pick-up trucks or Tim Hortons or a political platform; ours is the type parodied in sketch comedy and denigrated in political attack ads. You'd spin our grandparents as hard-working and sacrificing, and us as spoiled.

The garbage collectors are doing this Real, Honest Hard Work that is usually lauded or even glamourized. So why are people so opposed to them making a decent income - above the poverty line but well below the household average?