Detectives who work on CSAM cases. They have to watch, document, and describe the offending material in order to enter it as evidence. Then they get undeserved hatred for working with law enforcement.
If they never physically offend, and watching all of it, documenting it, and submitting it puts away those who do physically offend, and it saves someone else the trauma of having to watch it…
Just the iky feeling that they’d be getting off on the videos is what makes me stop short of saying it’s a good idea. Like… it’s just hard to say okay to something like that.
I’d imagine it would be similar to if porn was banned entirely and you were in a job where you had to view seized pornography. A good chunk of it would simply not be your thing, and the overexposure to pornography would be so bad for your mental and sexual health
Waste pickers in the clothing canyons of Ghana, or any other landfill/wasteland
Volunteer caregivers for people with disabilities, especially in places where there are limited or no social safety nets
Street vendors like the children hawking goods in Yemen or Samoa or Zimbabwe...
Cleaners, such as the Sewer divers in places like India where there is no protective equipment provided
Food services workers.
"Domestic" services workers like childcare, housekeeping, etc. I include victims of forced marriages here.
All other exploited, outsourced, trafficked, and/or forced labour, such as the cobalt miners in Congo, or the clothing sweatshop workers in Bangladesh, or the Phillipines call centre workers, or the hazelnut pickers in Turkey, or construction labourers in Qatar, or the chaingangs in the US.
Sudharak Olwe has spent a lot of time documenting the lives of "conservancy workers" in Mumbai. His entire body of work is worth a look, Content warning: Image 12 is extremely NSFL with the body of a human child, but there are also dead and dying animals in images 4 and 11but here is one collection. The photo I see most frequently is the one of a worker neck-deep in a drain
This is a great comment, and I believe the best addition to the thread.
I think you may really like this 4 part music/art video series.
Filastine - Abandon
From the description: Abandon bridges video art, documentary, and music to explore how we sell our time on earth, and how we could imagine to get free. Each of the four episodes profiles a unique personal revolt against low-valued work: an Indonesian miner, a Portuguese maid, American office workers, and Spain’s scrap metal salvagers.
Thanks for sharing that! I confess dance is not really a medium I appreciate enough, but the music and filmography and overall sentiment were great. It reminds me of my favourite movie, Baraka.
If you haven't seen it, it's a beautiful collection of global footage with music, and arguably more optimistic than I am. But it was from 1992 when things did seem a little more hopeful. It's in a similar vein to the Qatsi trilogy, which is more famous.
This is just one "Chapter"/song from it, but it's something I think about often. It's probably the saddest part of an otherwise emotionally varied film: Baraka: Dead Can Dance - Host of Seraphim (7mins 14sec) Unfortunately none of the people here are actors or performers though, except the Japanese Butoh dancers at the end of it.
I can't help but wonder how many of these people have survived the last 30 years since this movie.
Good booked called “A Decolonial Feminism” by Françoise Verges talks about the line of oppression which is defined by those which arrive at clean places and those that must make those places clean. Totally thankless and even exported for imperialism (sending trash to other countries to deal with for very little money, which they must accept because they’re already in poverty from Imperialism).
Kitchen staff, for the most part, work long hours in chronically understaffed kitchens for very little pay. You get a break when things slow down and chances are you’re going to be eating, hitting the bathroom, and trying to get a little sit time in a milk crate out back in that short little window (hint, pick two of those, the third might not happen).
You get burned, cut, over heated, covered in filth, and breathe in noxious crap all day from stoves, fryers, industrial cleaning chemicals, and other things.
You, probably, and a lot of your coworkers are short tempered, sore, tired, and possibly on drugs or alcohol. You are surrounded by ideal weapons for hurting others and you will be in or see a fight every so often.
Wait staff pretend to like you but really they work shorter shifts, go home relatively unscathed, and make a fortune in tips. So you also dislike and resent them. You don’t want to but see above.
You work when everyone else is off so you end up hanging out with people in similar situations who aren’t always the best people for things like networking into a better job. They really like partying though, and who needs a future.
Then you get a little older. Maybe you are running a kitchen and finally don’t need to have roommates to afford the horrible apartment but you’re only there about seven hours in a row at any given time. You met someone through friends but they don’t see a future because you are always working.
Eventually, health issues force you to find other work and you claw your way to normalcy 15 years behind everyone else in retirement saving, salary growth, and so on.
I haven’t worked in the industry since the late 90s so maybe it’s better now?
There are positives. I learned that stress is transitory and I don’t have to give in to it. Staying calm and working the system is how you survive getting slammed (overwhelmed by orders). I was in charge of a kitchen as sous chef in my early twenties, hiring people, ordering the supplies and ingredients, preparing for banquets and events. This was a massive confidence builder. I learned how to work with people I literally could not stand, and got to work with people I would back up in any situation.
Plus your going to be a good cook for the rest of your life and that’s a big plus. You might not want to cook when you are not at work but you can and that’s great for family entertaining and your own personal enjoyment later in life.
I also traveled to places I never would have been able to go to if I wasn’t working there. I lucked out and worked in high end places, including one featured in the European Vogue Cooking magazine (meant something back then). I also worked in some dives.
I learned so much about people and myself. But you can do that a lot of other ways that pay better!
One last thing. With the exception of one or two really tough manual labor tasks I’ve done, no job has seemed hard after my time as a cook.
This is encouraging. Thing is, she’s on the spectrum. I could see that working in her favor or becoming something unmanageable. So far she is the star pupil according to chef and if she could just complete a two year program and feel good about that accomplishment, my heart would be swole.
Even if she walked away from it in a few years, if she took away half of the positives you did I would consider it a win.
No worries, there other ways to work in food services. Breakfast cooking was a favorite of mine because I was mostly alone until 9 or 10 am in different hotels (you start at 5). Just you and the bacon. When breakfast is over it help with lunch and then you’re done.
Pastry and bakery shops are also usually much more professional environments where attention to detail and consistency are very important. I have worked in a few of these (once full time, mostly just helping out here and there as needed in hotels) and it’s nothing like the main kitchen.
You can also work in banquet venues where there’s less yelling and stress compared to a la carte cooking.
One thing I really liked is if you worked hard, helped others when they needed it, and did your share of the cleaning, and showed up days after day you were part of the crew. I worked with people that could barely read, lapsed philosophers, guy training to be a pilot, washed up old guys who didn’t know anything else, and we had each other’s backs. It was good a lot of the time.
Food is art and just like art the people that produce them often run on razor thin margins. Aside from being a celebrity or an extremely niche job like being a private chef I am not sure if there is a lot of culinary work that pays very well.
It’s certainly an excellent hobby and life skill (you’ll never be hungry again) but you can very easily learn that from home by watching other famous chefs.
Yeah, I’ve put a bug in her ear about some of the niche job paths. Private chef, test kitchens, etc. would love to see her win the lottery with something lush but know that is not to be expected. Thanks for your response!
If she has good qualifications, she could cook in China in a city like Shanghai if she doesn’t want to get burnt out. They would give good working terms and conditions, they just want a foreign cook on the team. Moreover foreign cooks are very common in big hotels and can usually run the kitchen as the Chinese staff can still be pretty mediocre at Western dishes.
Extremely interesting. She’s really into Asian food (Vietnamese and Filipino) but has a natural talent for Tex Mex and soul-ish food. Thanks for the response!
I’d say so. My wife has a degree in culinary. She’s used it to work her way up the hospitality industry and is now a regional GM over a few hotels in our area.
Well fuck man I’m a senior in highschool and I was debating between culinary school and IT/engineering or something the like. Just made my choice a hell of a lot easier.
Uhhhhh did you just read my autobiography? Graduated with a degree in culinary arts after high school whilst working in kitchens throughout the course of school. Worked my way up to district management in a metropolitan area. 15 years in I had zero life outside of work and nothing to show for my work other than crippling depression and addictions. Moved back home to start over. Got a 9-5 municipal job and I’m back in school working towards a doctorate in a completely different field. Never been happier in my adult life than the past 4 years that I’ve been out of the service industry. Fuck restaurants. It’s even ruined my ability to enjoy eating out. Doesn’t help that it costs a fortune now and 20% tips aren’t enough anymore. Also fuck the restaurant owners that take advantage of their staff.
I can enjoy a good restaurant but get really upset at crappy ones. I mean the kind of crappy you can detect with this kind of background. Like terrible menu choices that you know mean tons of frozen product or line cooks that have so many dishes to remember that they just wing it on half of them.
And I’ll never spend my own money to have someone else cook me a steak. :)
Health care aide. They get paid a pittance to clean up people who have pooped themselves. They should get 300 dollars an hour and a bottle of tequila per shift.
Speaking as a surgical tech: hospital janitorial staff, and sterile processing staff. They are INVISIBLE until something goes wrong, then everyone likes to bitch and point fingers, but they bust their asses constantly to keep us from becoming a giant pathogen cocktail. Hospitals would be fucking disgusting in the scope of like, idk, 2 hours, without those peeps.
Been a little bit since I put one of them in for an award. I think it’s time to flex my keyboard again.
I’d say being a property owner isn’t a job, which may be more what they’re thinking.
But property manager is definitely a job, though I think in many cases people equate property manager with landlord, because there are those that are both.
It’s a form of employment, but it does nothing but harm for society. Property should not be hoarded, but distributed fairly. If everyone who needed property had only what they needed, no one would need property managers. Therefore, property managers enable the hoarding of property, and that’s a bad thing.
Sitting on his ass or going golfing while his tenants work their ass to give 70% or their salary to the landlord, only for the MF to raise the rent a 50% without warning because his mistress wants to go on vacation somewhere in the Caribbean, doesn’t sound like a job.
So I guess I’m a landlord. We have a house that we rent. Bought it in 2007 using this cool thing called a sub prime mortgage. So we were sorta forced to hold on to the house and rent it.
Fast forward 15 years and I’m now renting the house I live in from a landlord. It’s made me realize that we’re good landlords. My dishwasher has been broken for two months collecting mold while its replacement has sat in my living room waiting to be installed.
Our own tenants have mostly been cool but I wish the guy we cut a break with (few months for free when he lost his job during covid) hadn’t grown weed in the garage and damaged some floors.
Other than that one guy, I don’t expect anybody to thank me.
With house prices having almost doubled since 2007 and considering you (or someone else) has been paying your mortgage for 15 years, why don’t you sell it and buy a new house to live in?
Bought the house when we had one kid. Now we have four. It’s too small for us to live in right now. That said, we’re thinking when our older kids move out we’ll move back in to our first house. The mortgage is certainly cheaper.
After leaving that house we moved twice (into larger homes… my in-laws moved in with us at one point). We bought both times. We rent our residence now for a couple of reasons: COVID fucked up my finances from a few angles and we couldn’t get lending this time. And we’ve got 3 kids moving out in the next 3 years or less. So we’re kind of in a transition period anyway.
I mean, the title was “thankless”, not “undeservedly thankless” 😆.
Maybe they should have said “a good landlord”. Because a good landlord is often the one you never talk to, because nothing breaks and rent never raises. Which are things that don’t happen on accident.
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