Sewer Cleaner

There were almost no qualifications for this disgusting job. In some cities, the work was performed by manual laborers. In others, publicly-owned slaves completed the work. Their job was to clean out the sewers, public latrines, and trash-clogged streets of cities and large towns. From the Insular Sea to Satra and beyond, this job was common anywhere agricultural societies employed sewers to maintain a modicum of urban cleanliness.
Hope was in short supply, for slaves and free men alike.
Slaves owned by the city or kingdom who needed their latrine and sewers cleaned were not paid in coins, but were housed at the state’s expense. For free men, pay was pitiful and shifts persisted for long nighttime hours. In many cities, they earned the equivalent of an unskilled laborer’s pay in local silver. The disgusting nature of the work, however, made the pay not worth the labor compared to working in construction or hauling trade goods.
There were few benefits to the job, but plenty of drawbacks. The stench of urine and feces was beyond horrendous. Such smells never left the workers. Even if they afforded multiple baths, the men still reeked of the sewers. They often entered and exited the sewers at night, to avoid disturbing other inhabitants. Many lived in seedy, less desirable areas of cities.
These men were thought of as perpetually disgusting and reeking of feces. This was to a large extent true because of the long hours spent elbow and knee-deep in filth.
The men who scrubbed public latrines and sewers were consistently among the lowest-status people in the world, no matter the culture. Cleaners were the subject of jests and mocked in the streets, despite the essential role they played in maintaining their homes’ cleanliness. Insular Sea society saw actors, prostitutes, and slaves as part of society’s lowest rung, along with cleaners.