In case you have not noticed yet, employees of the Cebu City Department of Public Services who do sanitation work out in the streets now wear very impressive-looking uniforms. They are now in blue and gray overalls. And they now wear shoes. They look like engineers, for God's sake. Whoever thought of the idea of dressing up our street cleaners deserves the heartiest congratulations.
Keeping the streets of any city or municipality clean is no easy job. It is backbreaking work. Most of the time you are out in the sun, choking in the dust. If it rains, you have to be effectively spry to find immediate shelter or else you get drenched and can get sick doing a job whose pay, even under the best of terms, leaves no room for sickness.
And that is just the weather. More importantly, there is the hazard of being in the midst of moving vehicles. One can easily get killed or maimed if one is not careful. To work out there in the streets under such terrible conditions truly requires a certain sense of commitment and dedication. And yet these workers seldom get any appreciation. They do not even get noticed.
Still they go at it, day after day, logging up the hours just so the rest of the public can go about their business in an atmosphere that is at least clean and livable. The work that street cleaners do also allows the city as a whole to acquire the ability to claim that, at least in one aspect of urbanization, one negative has been effectively held in check.
To spruce up their appearance, therefore, is a great morale booster. It lends respectability to a job not many would want to do. And it gives dignity to the person who actually does the job. If for nothing else, it makes them look important. And every so often, that is actually good enough for many of them. It is such a happy development even for the rest of the Cebuanos just to see them looking as great as they look now.
And that is why it is a cause for wonderment why nobody thought of the idea before. True, it has long been the practice to clothe these employees in uniforms. But no one thought of dressing them up in overalls. Before, street cleaners everywhere wore thin cotton shirts that either had long or short sleeves. These faded and tore quickly, making those who wore them look exactly like the jobs they perform. Now they look like F1 pit stop engineers. Isn't that just great?