About Oppression

Serious topic thought about in the shower.

Just a brief random thought anyway.

What are locals oppressed by?

Nah I don't know. But something along the lines that I thought of was that many people are entangled in this knowledge race and many schools, bogus or not have been propagating pretty well here.

Lower educated people find it hard to get a good paying job
Lower educated people who are old end up doing jobs that are not suitable for their age such as cleaning for say 8 hrs a day, driving taxis for long hours.

There's this little old lady cleaning the library block. Sometimes it pains me to see her cleaning, dragging trash out everyday. And it's done solo and probably a solitary job done for most of a working day.
Social life shrinks as we age I suppose, compounded by her lack of social interaction in her job. She sees plenty of people each day - in the lifts, on library and ground floors, but I guess very very few would even bother to smile at her. I certainly hope my mum won't fall into the same fate as her and I hope we'll see lesser of these in SG. My mum's fingernailbed infection from her last childcare job pains me enough already.

I'm no expert on management issues and stuff but I think something should be done to pepper up low wage workers' life. Going back to the little hideout underneath the staircase to chat with other co-workers seems pretty sad.

On the other hand I think the school security team seems to have a much better time. Sitting on bikes patrolling, sitting in an air-con room monitoring threats (though if a threat comes, there's nothing much they can do except dial 999). Therefore a sweeping conclusion here would be that comfortable working environment is important.

Opportunities to socialise is also important. Some cleaners are talkative, some are not; but I guess those who express themselves often have a much brighter life.

I remember a career talk held back in JC.

"......hope you guys will go back and think about your future. For me, this is my future already, I'm here teaching you all. "

Or does it mean "there goes my search for a 'future'"?


Increasingly, I begin to define "future" as a state of uncertainty with an optimistic outlook.

So it's like when you land a job, your "future" kinda pauses or might unfortunately end depending on you and your situational circumstances.

So the proposed model is this :


School (hope) -------"FUTURE"-------> Job (might be a wall)



I hope the future also belongs to the cleaners. Human beings deserve more than just sweeping floors and clearing trash.