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And the pay warps the whole "have aspirations beyond those jobs" part, too, because in many cases those aspirations are based on a desire for greater financial security. Conversely, the jobs people usually aspire to are often sought out more for the pay than for their intrinsic value or enjoyability.
Aspirations to do what? Go on vacations? Have kids? Visit other countries? All those things can be provided to everyone under a socialist economic model. People can clean offices and also take nice vacations and attend university and have kids and enjoy nice things if we decouple those benefits from employment.
Being a janitor is undesirable because you get treated and paid like shit, and because you're expected to work long hours alone.
If your janitor shift was 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, and the other people working in your plant or office didn't shit on you, it wouldn't be an undesirable job. It'd just be a job.
No one leaves christmas cards for IT developers who work to make you .0001% more likely to interact with an ad, but people do leave christmas cards for trash collectors and mail carriers because they're important, valued members of the community.
Bear in mind a lot of the reason people don't like those jobs are the bad working conditions and low wages.
Give me decent pay and good, flexible hours and I would be a janitor any day of the weekPlus i assume in a decent communist society, people wouldn't just take a shit in the middle of the bathroom floor like a psychopath
We can fix the economy, end war, and bring peace to mankind but we will never plumb the hidden secrets of the shower shitter.
but it’s really not that bad to clean up as long as you have the right tools (in my experience)
True, but it's more the senselessness of it that pisses me off
People will still do senseless things in a communist society. They'll probably do fewer of them, but there will always be some.
I would assume there would be greater respect for the workers making civilisation possible
Sure, but you're always going to have some people who are just assholes, and you're always going to have some people who don't instantly learn to treat common spaces, sanitation workers, etc. with respect.
I clean for a living right now. It's not a great job, but the complaints I haveis that I have too little time to do what I want, and that the management keeps fucking us over wither by trying to fix problems that don't exist, or that they don't understand. Fix that, and I'd have no complaints.
Also, cleaning ain't difficult. You could solve it simply by having it be done by people not having anything else to do at the time, before they move onto other stuff. Most of the unpleasantness of any dull job is the creeping dread that you'll be doing it until you die.
I'd be more worried about finding people to do the dangerous "low status" jobs which require specific competence. But by reducing hours and paying more attention to worker safety, a lot of those would prove more palatable ad well.
90% of cleaning should be done by the people making the mess. That requires an adjustment in our cultural view of labour. Cleaning isnt below certain people, or certain roles... its simply a part of every role. Specialty cleaning, and cleaning of public spaces, would presumably be automated to some extent - and the folks running the machines, and doing the labour, would just get job benefits to compensate for the shittiness of their work like lower than average working hour, or a fancier place to live.
This is basically what I was going to say. Especially with the computing power we have at our disposal today, we could make all sorts of adjustments - even in real time - to make sure certain kinds work gets done. Wages, hours, vacation time, etc.
Imagine how many lazy doctors and lazy nurses we could have if we trained doctors and nurses based on need and on the assumption that doctors should get lots of rest instead of letting private universities train just enough doctors to keep the profession extremely rare and valuable. All our medical people could live in modest homes and work modest hours and have modest case loads if we just trained enough of them to meet the needs of our society and didn't make them pay for their education or fight for a limited number of slots in the "Right" schools.
I remember when I read Dinotopia as a kid, there was a part that introduced the guys who go around the city with wheelbarrows and shovel up the dinosaur shit. They were well respected and treated as heroes. That stuck with me.
I'd take anything over this. The deadlines just never stop, and as soon as one major project is over I end up with three more.
The idea that no one will choose to do these kinds of jobs is literally anti-communist propaganda. There is absolutely no backing to it whatsoever. It's made up.
The jobs need to be done. People will do them. It's as simple as that.
Me. I'll do them. All of them.
Is that it? Is the last problem solved? Can we instate Communism now?
Maybe they could just get paid more or something. It’s important to note that communist society is not a pre made blueprint to establish in cookie cutter fashion, but the expansion of democracy in the economy to the working class. If we decide to share the work of undesirable jobs, then we do that. If we decide to incentivize it through increased wages, we could do that instead. Maybe workers in one city, country or state would decide differently than another.
