That's Barge Haulers on the Volga by Ilya Repin. You really have to look at the zoomed view to understand just how awful work can be.
Bad as that depiction is, I have a new example of what some people have to do to earn their daily bread.
From Open Magazine:
Manual Scavenging: The Struggle to Stay out of Pits
THE MEN COME early in the morning at around seven. Some have had tea at home, some haven’t; but once they report for work, most will keep drinking country liquor from short plastic tumblers. It is the only way they can tolerate the feel of excreta in sewers and septic tanks against their bare bodies. Their eyes are floating globs of yellow, their cheeks as sunken as the city’s potholes. They sit on grimy mattresses in a bamboo shack at the end of a street, smoking beedis and passing bawdy remarks at the heroine of a film some of them have seen a few days earlier, as they wait for people to come and offer them work: opening up choked septic tanks, mostly, in this part of north-west Delhi.HT: Alpha Ideas' Weekend Mega Linkfest
The householders come, standing at a distance, telling them what they have come for. Someone among the men whose turn it is to go will nod as he pretends to listen; he is not interested in the full description—he just needs to hear the key word: sewer or septic tank. He will then look the householder in the eye and quote a price, usually a few hundred rupees. The man who has come with the job will make a face but usually relent quickly; nobody wants shit spilling out in the backyard.
Today, they are fewer by one. Last night, their senior-most worker’s son, who worked till recently with his father, had an altercation with someone and shot him with a ‘teen sau pandraah’, a .315 bore country-made pistol. The victim survived but has suffered grave injuries. Now, the father and son have fled, fearing police action. There is no other earning member in the family. The woman of the house waits discreetly nearby, her face covered with a dupatta, looking for both work and clues of the whereabouts of her husband and son. The men, in the meantime, go one by one, two of them together, because one of the sewers reported blocked is about 20 feet deep. After they are gone, stray dogs come in to escape the rain outside and spread themselves lazily over the mattresses.
The men come and go as the work comes. On most days, they get one job; some days, a few among them might get lucky and get two.
At 4 pm, the last among them is asked to clear a blocked septic tank in a nearby colony. Bittu is sloshed by this time. “If I don’t drink, I cannot get in,” he says. He is 44, but looks at least 10 years older. His eyes are partially damaged—a result of toxic fumes from a sewer pipeline he had to enter a few years ago. Sometimes, to humour his visitors, he pretends to be totally blind and calls himself Bittu bhikaari—Bittu, the beggar.
Bittu has worked with excreta for 30 years. One of his two sons (he also has five daughters) works with him now; he, too, started as an early teen, the age his father did. Bittu was initiated by one of his elder brothers; their father was a sweeper with the Delhi Municipal Corporation. Bittu gets work from government contractors as well as from private houses or businesses. Five years ago, his wife died of a mysterious disease, leaving him to take care of their children. The elder daughter now takes care of the house, a jhuggi in a nearby slum. “I am a Raja Babu and so is my son,” he says, alluding to their lack of formal education like the actor Govinda’s character in a film called Raja Babu. “We cannot get out of this cycle,” he says, “this is our destiny; but I hope my son is able to leave this. When I see him till his neck in shit, it breaks my heart.”
The Government has a name for Bittu and his friends: sanitation workers. But in reality, it is just a euphemism for manual scavenging as their work involves the use of hands to handle excreta. The Indian state has laws prohibiting the employment of manual scavengers and has largely been in denial of their existence. In May 2016, for example, the Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment, Vijay Sampla, said in the Rajya Sabha that the Government has identified over 12,226 manual scavengers across India. A year earlier, the Socio-Economic Caste Census revealed that India still has 180,657 households that are dependent on manual scavenging for a living....MORE
