WHEN 48-year-old sanitation worker Li Guihong started working in the South Railway Station in 2005, she had to bring two big thermoses of hot water and some instant noodles from home every day because there were no staff amenities provided.
“No hot water and no place for breaks or meals,” she said. “No place to get out of the sun in summer or the cold in winter. It was so painful.”
The nearly 57,000 sanitation workers who sweep streets, scrub toilets and pick up garbage in Shanghai occupy a low rung of the occupational ladder in the city. It’s pretty thankless work, but take them away and what would the city look like?
Today marks China’s sanitation worker festival, which was initiated in 1987. This week, the Shanghai Greenery and Public Sanitation Bureau will launch a campaign calling on companies and public facilities to provide staff rooms where cleaners can take breaks and eat meals.
The bureau wants to lift the profile of sanitation workers so that the public appreciates the nonstop work that goes into keeping the city tidy.
Working conditions are improving gradually. The city government has been raising pay and trying to create better work environments to stop the churn of sanitation employees.
In 2005, Li said, there were 21 sanitation workers at the railway station. Nineteen of them left in disgust at the working conditions and poor pay.
The lowest monthly salary of a sanitation worker was 1,915 yuan (US$300) in Shanghai at the end of last year, according to the Shanghai General Labor Union. In the past two years, salaries of Li’s team members have increased by about 500 yuan a month to more than 3,000 yuan. After several years’ service, pay rises to 4,500 yuan, she said.
Li is now leader of a team that used to lose at least 10 members a year. As salaries improved, that number fell to one last year and none so far this year.
The South Railway Station is a cleaner’s nightmare. Its huge pedestrian traffic creates the largest amount of refuse of any single spot in Shanghai. Cleaners haul away up to three tons of garbage every day and up to 8 tons a day on holidays.
“In the past, there were not so many people in Shanghai and many streets were small, so the workload of cleaners wasn’t that heavy,” Li said. “But with rapid urban expansion and large numbers of out-of-towners coming to the city, the amount of refuse is surging.”
The area that Li and her colleagues clean every day covers over 150,000 square meters, the area of about 28 football fields. There is little time for work breaks, Li said.
She moans when describing how passengers vomit or urinate in the railway station vicinity and how food vendors leave oily pools that are hard to scrub away. Some taxi drivers throw melon-seed shells into the shrubbery and flowerbeds, which have to be picked out by hand. One taxi driver had the audacity to tell Li that if people didn’t create such a mess, the cleaners wouldn’t have jobs.
Cleaners also face hazards. One was hit by a car recently and hospitalized, Li said. And glass and medical waste thrown in garbage bins pose dangers.
“The safety of sanitation workers is difficult to protect,” Li said.
Still, she tries to focus on the positive. Restrooms with air conditioning have been built for cleaners, and Li is also now entitled to a free lunch.
For these guardians of public cleanliness, one of the hardest things to endure is the scorn heaped on their occupation.
“When I was younger, people asked contemptuously how I could bear to work as a lowly street cleaner, and I turned red in the face,” Li said. “But now, I think more people are starting to appreciate the service we do for the city.”
Despite all these improvements, staff recruitment is still difficult. On Li’s team, 85 cleaners are migrant workers. The average age of team members is more than 40 years. “Locals and youngsters are not willing to do the job,” she said.
