What is the most "Thankless" job?

If someone comments saying their actual current job, please be kind and thank them in a reply.

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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.
Our supply chains for everything are filled with slavery. 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, of which 27.6 million were in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. That's an estimated increase of 10 million people from 2016 to 2021.
- thanks for this very exhaustive list. this is the first time ive heard of sewer divers - with no PPE - sounds terrible.
  
  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 11 but here is one collection. The photo I see most frequently is the one of a worker neck-deep in a drain
  Terrible is certainly a good word to describe it.
  
  Klick on those links with caution, especially the collection is most definitely NSFL.
  
  Oh goodness, I'm really sorry! I entirely forgot some of those pics were at that level. I'll add a content warning to my post.
- 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.
  
  Baraka and Samsara are both amazing films
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/playlist?list=PLOgOGcIsnvZw7Fslm-afdYk-JHOsXclv4
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

196 comments