<Hmmm. Big surprise, but I have a slightly different slant on this story, although Mary Ann, below, touches on it when she notes that much of the squalor of a job like this is due to the filthy habits of some humans.

Who hasn't gagged at the sight and smell of a wretchedly squalid public restroom - a place so vile and repulsive that we flee in horror, nature's urgencies notwithstanding?



Agreed. Nothing cheeses me off like seeing paper and crap laying on the ground within ten feet of a trash can. And how anybody who isn't traveling with a seeing-eye dog can miss the broad front of a urinal is beyond my comprehension. It may be the engineer's natural urge to impose order on existence, but I hate it when people go through life like pigs. I'm probably the only one in a movie theater who collects my cups and boxes and actually carries them to a trash bin instead of leaving them on the floor. Okay, maybe I'm just anal, but the guys who have to pick up the theater probably appreciate it. I slung silage in a vegetable factory for my first job and know what scutwork is like. It does give one an appreciation for even a tedious desk job.

But what really grosses me out about this issue is the fact that there are minimum wage jobs at all at the same time that chief execs of failing companies are making up to several hundred million bucks a year.



And such people are probably the same guys who decide that poor schmoes like Adama toil on amid the filth and misery at the minimum wage.

If the work ethic in this country has suffered, I think we smell one good reason.

It's a Big Stink, and a good part of the 20th centruy was spent dealing with one failed attempt based on a flawed idea to redistribute the wealth, and there's no telling what its extant Asian stepchildren have in store for us in the 21st, so I'm certainly not advocating any further socialist revolutions along Marxist lines. Rather, I would look to a visionary more like, say, R. Buckminster Fuller as a source for blueprints to remake civilization in a more equitable and certainly more functional form.

Nobody is worth 250 million bucks a year, and when a man like Adama provides a service that probably is worth a million bucks, but gets far, far less, we need to consider how many social ills arise from such dramatic inequities, and how skewed our values have become.

Everybody should have a chance to clean toilets for awhile. Perhaps that might remind people that shared resources should be treated with respect and care, and how much we all depend on people like Adama doing the dirty work.



Don't confuse wealth with salaries. Most of the richest people have a large worth on paper based on stocks that have increased in value since they were issued. Bill Gates, for example, earns less than a million a year in salary, but has billions on paper in stock.

Nobody "decides" that toilet cleaners should get low pay. In a free market, people get paid what other people think they are worth. It's important--in fact it's critical--to remember that "worth" in this sense is in the financial sense only, a response to mindless laws of supply and demand. A successful CEO earns millions because, ideally, he has a unique talent. It is very rare that such a person has not worked his way up to such a position, and established a record of successes to display that unique talent. Supply and demand works for people too, which is why one-of-a-kind types like Madonna or Michael Jordan haul in big bucks. Remember, all these people are getting paid millions because what they do MAKES much more for whatever outfit is paying them.

CEOs who rip off failing companies are aberrations, not the rule. Sometimes they are even criminals. CEOs who get huge salaries despite their companies going down the drain don't keep those salaries long. The tens of thousands of honest executives who don't make the mainstream news you never hear of. Try reading "Forbes." This list says a lot about who gets paid what, and which ones are earning it, and which ones are heading for a pay cut.

A person who cleans toilets cannot command a large salary in a free market, because frankly, ANYONE can clean toilets, and millions are willing to for the low salary offered. Even more are willing to come into the U.S. to clean toilets, which is one hell of a lot better job than whatever they were doing to eat where they came from.

This does NOT mean that a toilet cleaner is an inferior person to the CEO, although through much of human history it was typical and even cultural for people to think so ("class" still has a different meaning in Europe). It may not even mean that he is not as smart as the CEO, although his intelligence may not yet being utilized to its potential. The vast majority of people who start at such jobs do not end up there.

...Think about the next guy, get out of the way, leave things the way you found them...



Hard work, fair play; common sense, common courtesy.

Simple values. It should be so easy...



Good advice. And it is easy, most of the time. Like I pointed out, a lot of the trash in this world is less than ten feet from the can.