Why is it that so many people in Singapore (but everywhere else too, really) think they know how to run an entire country?
And why so many are so eager to comment without reading?
Someone posted a screenshot of a Skills Future training course on cleaning toilets and widespread netizen mockery began. I think all of those wise guys should be identified, plucked out of their jobs for a year, and sent to clean toilets. Without prior training.
Perhaps that could teach them to read before they open their mouths next time.
The fact is that training such as this is a result of many years of collaboration between the government and unions representing the cleaning profession, to help elevate the poorest members of the society.
You may ignorantly think that because you have a good job you surely know how to clean a toilet. And sure, you may, at your home, but not in a shopping mall, at the airport or anywhere else with significant foot traffic.
Moreover, as people in the profession have long been looked down on by others, who think there's nothing "professional" about wiping toilet bowls and sinks, their career prospects were rather grim, since there were few tangible skills that they could prove to have acquired on the job.
This has long kept their wages depressed while depriving them of a career path that would enable them to make more money in the future.
To address that problem in this and other, similarly affected jobs, the government introduced Progressive Wage Model, that would not only guarantee a certain minimum level of wages but also lead to professionalisation of the activity, by providing training in different areas that would be rewarded with higher salaries and a path to becoming e.g. a supervisor in the future.
This is seen as a superior solution to a blanket minimum wage, which only provides a monetary floor but doesn't address the bigger problem of lack of perspectives.
With PWM not only are low-wage workers guaranteed a minimum pay but a career path as well. Double win.
Of course, to climb the rungs of the professional ladder they have to be able to show that they possess the skills to do it.
Which is where training comes in.
To jump to the next step you have multiple training options you can complete. And yes, cleaning toilets is one of them, among others. Ultimately, once you complete specific education across multiple areas, you can hope to jump to other related professions or even supervisory and managerial roles.
In fact, the training itself helps those in the industry to understand how professional knowledge is passed to others, so they can train them in the future.
I know that to every average smug ignorant cleaning is just spraying stuff around and wiping it off with a rag or a mop, but it's about as relevant as your mum's cooking is to being a chef at a restaurant.
In locations with high foot traffic, cleaning has to be done efficiently, thoroughly and safely.
You don't want guests to slip on the floor and break their neck, but you want the floor to be clean at all times. You want everything to work properly, smell nice and be maintained well enough that it is going to serve the business for years to come.
Cleaners have to handle chemicals and equipment properly too, so there's no waste, abuse or unintended damage by using wrong agents in wrong places.
Some people argue that cleaners didn't need training in the past, so why they would need it today - only to forget that incidence of diarrhoea was surely considerably higher then than it is today, and that toilets too didn't look quite the way they do today either.
But what I find really bizarre is how quickly the lessons of the pandemic have faded.
Singapore reopened its borders less than 2 years ago, after a total lockdown and heightened sanitary regime across the entire country.
I thought people have learned that proper hygiene - which includes thorough cleaning - is not only important but can require quite some knowledge to do properly, in order to prevent the spread of diseases.
Public restrooms are not your home toilet, used by a few people that share the entire space together anyway. They are frequented by thousands every single day, and provide environment for the spread of all sorts of bacteria or viruses between unrelated people.
It's in the interest of all of us that they are maintained to the highest standards.
Just like it should be in public interest to allow those at the bottom of the society to have a promise of a better future if only they put in some effort and take advantage of the opportunities provided by the government and the unions that clearly care about this far more than the sneering fools on the internet.
