Make a census of the shittiest fucking work on Earth and start automating from there. In 10 years the shittiest job will be feeling ennui smoking a long cigarette under a crescent moon on a little Perisian rooftop
Its an extremely out of touch question. Most people clean their own toilet. Its normal. And not a big deal.
I think it’s more relevant in the context of public and workplace restrooms. Of course people are expected to clean their toilets at home, but who will clean the 500 toilets at the dicksucking factory? Pulling dicksuckers off the line to clean all the toilets is going to really put a dent in factory output.
Pulling dicksuckers off the line to clean all the toilets is going to really put a dent in factory output.
This is exactly how, for example, the US Military does it. Set aside a few hours per week for cleaning, have a list of daily/weekly/monthly cleaning tasks, and have everyone do them together. We could even dream big and imagine it being done without the hazing and time wasting that the military is famous for adding to the process. Yeah it reduces output but having a dirty factory where people are getting sick or can’t use the toilets also reduces output, so I think the rational thing is to include incidental labor like this into the input-output equation of the factory when you plan it.
But there are definitely a lot of jobs that suck that you would have to incentivize people to go into, but hey wouldn’t you know it every socialist country has figured out how to do exactly that and it usually isn’t done at gunpoint (looking at Pol Pot here).
I once worked for an ex marine that did this. The company wasn’t big, there was only one bathroom. Once a week someone would clean the break area and the bathroom. It was rotational. Everyone would clean their areas in the rest of the building. Every Friday at 4:00. We were a production based business but everyone was kind of mentally checked out by that time on Friday anyways. He did it mainly because he was cheap. It was easier to pay employees to clean for an hour than to hire a cleaner to come in. Honestly, it’s not a bad thing to do. It gave you a break from work-work and you could zone out while turning your brain to weekend mode.
My biggest issue with how the military does it is that there is a class of people (officers) who don’t have to clean, and in many cases don’t even have to clean their personal spaces.
Yeah, and I feel like it can be abstracted to assume that it’s some crappy and undesirable job. There’s nothing special, in the context of the argument, about the toilets - just illustrative of being undesirable.
i think at specifically the dick sucking factory you have a built-in downtime on the part of the suckees and they could be cleaning the toilets then.
Your right i didnt even consider the dicksuckers when thinking about this issue. My bad.
they may as well be asking “who’s gonna wipe my shitty ass hole for me after i take a dump?!”
the “who’s gonna wash the dishes” question is so smug and stupid. how about the person who made the dish dirty?
they may as well be asking “who’s gonna wipe my shitty ass hole for me after i take a dump?!”
the bidet
how about the person who made the dish dirty?
is that the cook or the person who ate? also dish washing machines exist and are fine if you read the manual or listen to that guy from chicago
The who’s going to wash the dishes question was asked by feminists in reference to communist men who wanted gender roles to continue after the revolution
im sure it was, now its only ever asked by rich assholes who think there wont be anyone to wash dishes post revolution
Rewarding people for doing sucky jobs proportionally to how sucky those jobs are
“This is deeply irrational and utopian.” -T. Capitalist
using dozens of sociological tricks to keep people doing sucky jobs trapped in them despite poverty wages
“This is the most efficient economic system!” -T. Capitalist
I would like people to have a premium for doing sucky jobs. I also think the idea that the job is going to suck no matter what is loser-thinking. Give them better tools, replace hard to clean toilet fixtures with easier to clean ones over time, ultimately create bathroom bots over a long period. Get the automation ready for when someone creates the blueprints to the anti-torment nexus.
Agreed 100%. Of course from our perspective within capitalism, the biggest improvements that can be made to almost any job are just like “pay the workers more” and “provide comprehensive medical benefits”, but in a socialist country where the workers have adequate representation/power within the system, all improvements to their lives are on the table including changing the nature of the work itself in ways that would be too expensive or would reduce profits under capitalism.
all improvements to their lives are on the table including changing the nature of the work itself in ways that would be too expensive or would reduce profits under capitalism
I think this is a point actually massively underappreciated by people. When you’re not chasing “line go up” and only chasing “make world better”, there is almost infinite room to make jobs work for everyone.
Kids in some schools in Japan clean the schools, including the bathroom. Same for office workers in Japan. This notion of janitor work is rooted in “the help” and the demands of whites to never get their hands dirty. The only people asking this question are white people.
Reminds me of he line from Jesus Does The Dishes by Wingnut Dishwashers Union:
So you’re asking me
Who does the dishes after
The revolution well
I do my own dishes now, I’ll do my own dishes then.
You know it’s always the ones who won’t
Who ask that fuckin question.
Hell yeah! Wingnut Dishwashers Union is great!
Its a funny source, but some historical context for my point: https://www.twobettysclean.com/bulletin-post/the-history-of-domestic-workers-and-janitors/
Very good article - I’m so confused by that source though lmao just so foreign to see on a corporate site
There’s a folk-punk song called Jesus Does The Dishes that goes:
"You’re asking me, who does the dishes after the revolution?
Well, I do my own dishes now, I’ll do my own dishes then.
It’s always the ones who don’t who ask that fucking question."
I will clean the toilets. All of them. But you have to worship me as a god.
poop god poop god
JAN-I-TOR 
I genuinely know people who really like cleaning, bathrooms included. If it wasn’t a stigmatized, underpaid and abused position in society they would surely be willing to do it even without improvement of the literal work beyond scrubbing and harsh chemicals. Making the working conditions better would just be a bonus. (not to mention it can be split up amongst a larger group of people)
The nice thing about being a janitor, speaking from professional experience, is that nobody bothers you. They don’t want to give you an opening where you might ask for help. Also, as long as you’re properly equipped and have a reasonable work load it really isn’t bad work.
Yeah I guess I was thinking more of situations where the lowest-rung employee gets the bathroom-cleaning duties thrust upon them, like restaurants or stingy small offices/shops. That has the potential to be nasty.
But in an institution of any reasonable size I suppose you have a dedicated janitor who is (hopefully) less shit upon. I knew a guy once who was just an independent cleaner, he’d come around every week after hours with his van and vacuum your offices and clean/stock your bathrooms and such (for smallish businesses). He just would jam out to tunes and work solo all evening, it seemed peaceful. He did say he got jumped once, so he’s pretty twitchy if he runs into people unexpectedly, but nothing worse than that.
Plus in my area at least all the big office tower janitors are union
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A larger group of people would be nice. I clean an office space once a week for what probably would be good pay if I cleaned more often, but they don’t even want more often even if ignoring my disability. I mainly clean the bathrooms while my sibling cleans other parts of the office. It’s not all that bad, I guess, my brain just fucking sucks and makes everything in life feel like the end of the world. But if we got all the people who enjoy cleaning together and let them clean without judgement or exploitation, like you say, I think everywhere would be a much cleaner place. I mean, we kinda figured this out with hacking. Companies discovered they can pay people to hack them with the condition that they tell them what exploit they used. Of course that’s not really ethical to help big companies protect themselves, but I can see where a post-capitalist world would have a good use for that kind of thing.
On the off-grid commune that I lived on, literally the day after we put the finishing touches (door and railing) on our composting toilet, we woke up the next morning to find someone had just taken a messy poop on the floor. It ended up being someone with IBS who had arrived in the night and couldn’t navigate in time. By the time we figured that out, 2 people had just gone and cleaned it up. They were absolved from any chore expectations for the rest of the week.
Super simple stuff. Doing good stuff is… le good!
I mean we did have a big suspicion/rumor mill going around the breakfast fire for an hour and a half.
But the guy who’d just arrived was really apologetic and immediately volunteered to haul a bunch of wood. And that was the end of the “Things that go Dump in the Night” episode.
“I [clean] my own [toilet] now, I’ll [clean] my own [toilet] then. You know it’s always the ones who don’t who ask that fucking question.”
i think it’s about public toilets?
Yeah I know I just wanted to use that quote
I do think it can be applied at least a bit to broader society though. I hate the framing that cleaning the toilet (or washing the dishes) is some fate worse than death and we can only achieve a clean toilet through extreme exploitation. I’ve lived in communal situations and have had no issue cleaning the toilet or washing the dishes. It’s like the opposite of that argument that there will be no doctors if wealth is distributed equally since I guess the only reason people become doctors is to acquire extreme wealth. Some people have no concept of working for the greater good.
Logistically how things would work I don’t think the quote gives much insight, but I do think it reframes the question/criticism a bit.
came here to reference this, glad someone already did
There is a lot of different kinds of labor that people would find rewarding to do if the pay wasn’t so degrading. I mean look at the way trash collectors are considered now, it’s a unionized respectable job in many places even though it’s also gross.
I still remember doing farm work as some of the best most fulfilling work I’ve ever done, and the biggest reason was that I was actually also getting paid well to do all that manual labor (this was marijuana).
: “So this sounds like there is an insufficient supply of toilet cleaners despite the demand! Only one thing left to do!”
: “Accept that this service will be more expe…”
: “Lay off half my workforce and not hire! Sorry gen Z, looks like you can forget about that college stuff, you get to scrub toilets for your dear uncle pork for minimum wage! Lucky you!”Nurses and caretakers of elderly/disabled people have to deal with human feces on a daily basis, probably more than a guy scrubbing public toilets. Anyone who owns a pet has to clean their shit up regularly. It’s like a running joke on the Deprogram how much gross stuff Hakim has to deal with as a doctor. The point is that the activity of cleaning toilets itself is not that bad, the problem is that the occupation is heavily looked down upon. It’s a job that we have designated as “the lowest of the low”, nobody respects it and it’s only worked by people who have no other options, which in turn makes it even less desirable for everyone else. If you offered me a weekly wage for either a) Having to clean public bathrooms for 8 hours a day or b) Having to look after an incontinent elderly person for 8 hours a day, I would pick the former in a heartbeat. But if I had to choose between the social standing of a caretaker and that of a bathroom janitor? That would change things.
Our very hierarchical capitalist society artificially exaggerates the undesirability of these occupations. In a communist utopia, would people fistfight each other to clean toilets? No, but you would absolutely find someone who’d do it because people have a natural desire to contribute to society, to feel useful and needed. You wouldn’t even have to pay them more than everyone else. Hell, there’d probably be a certain pride in doing the jobs nobody else wants to do, just as long as they’re respected and equally compensated.
tl;dr: Cleaning toilets isn’t all that bad. Having to tell your date that you clean toilets for a living is bad. Because of capitalism.
I’m gonna go ahead and say that cleaning toilets or the equivalent profession has been looked down upon since millennia before capitalism existed. I don’t imagine that the people cleaning the public latrines in ancient Rome were highly regarded professionals. I do think that a change to socialism could improve these things, but I think there’s more to it than “socialism will automatically make this better” and we all will need a fuckton of reeducation towards this.
more than a guy scrubbing public toilets
i dunno dawg ive seen some shit in public restrooms and i’m not even in there cleaning them
Anyone who owns a pet has to clean their shit up regularly
great reason to not have a pet
White people think people inherently don’t want to do work they deem as beneath them, but in reality more people would want to do this kind of work under socialism since you’ll be much more able to support yourself than before.
People don’t want to do this shit because the pay sucks ass and we have no social safety net.
I saw a video with commentary saying that in China it’s basically social suicide to feel that people who work jobs like farming and other manual labor as beneath one’s self.
Wow such 1984 no iphone vuvuzela of them
Quit describing jobs as being too “lowly” to be done by anybody but the “poors” or [insert-slur-here].
I’ve cleaned other people’s feces, urine and vomit off of walls and floors. Its gross but its fine. All I ask is for the proper equipment, respectable wages, and don’t look down on me for doing the work.
Find the people who aren’t disabled and otherwise incapable of preventing it who poop and shit and piss all over the floor, toilet seat, and walls and make them clean it forever like they’re Emperor Puyi living out a lifetime of penance
This is it, we need a secret bathroom police to uncover the shitters among us.
no need to pay cops, if you have a camera outside the bathroom you see who goes in but not yknow watching them and that way when someone goes in and it’s been shat all over they can narc on the shitter and at least at that point you narrow it down to the narc and the person who went in right before them. Unless someone doesn’t narc after they see a fully shat up bathroom because then anyone could be the wall n stall shitter at that point
No, we need a completely new force. Disband Space Force and rename it Ass Force. We need people who are 100% dedicated.
I’d go after some dude I hate so I can poo all over the walls and blame them for it
You put those blue puck things in the toilet bowl and it does 90% of the work for you.
