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Have garbage services also gone ‘office hours’?

While this may be the ‘high season’ for everything ketuanaan laced with overdoses of race and religious bashing, let us also go to the ground and see how we manage our cities. Let us look at garbage management.

In many countries - even in our neighboring nations, garbage collection and disposal in the cities are carried out outside of working hours.  But from the picture, this may not be so for Kuala Lumpur and our many townships in the country.

In Bangkok, and much all over Thailand for example, garbage collection is done in the wee hours of dawn. In many locations you will see them sweeping the streets and carting away all street trash well before the cities come alive with office workers rushing to work and businesses opening their doors.

In Malaysia, not only are our roads chocked with traffic as office workers apprehensive make an unpredictable dash to work, the presence of garbage trucks by the dozens and their workers add to the frustrations.

The stench is unbearable as these trucks pull over at bus stops and street junctions each morning when people are busy and pouring into the city.

The street sweepers and garbage bin collectors add to the inconvenience as people squeeze their way through the lanes and busily opening-up shop fronts.

And in many instances, bank workers and other spanking business premises operators are greeted each morning with thrash littered all across their frontage. Certainly owners of such premises will not deny this horrible state of affairs out of a sense of patronage or fear of upsetting the powers that be.

Question is since when did our garbage services decide to work office hours too? Is it also part of that profiteering mindset to cut wage costs by getting the workers to work within ‘normal’ work time instead of having to pay extra if work is carried out between 12midnight and six in the morning?

Or are our streets so unsafe that is now even dangerous for garbage workers to venture to work when night falls?

In Bangkok, for example, right after the businesses shut down at night, the street cleaners swing into action. In the smaller townships dotting all across the length of Thailand, every market and street is swept just in time before people start their day for work.

In fact some thirty years before, we too did the same. Now why have we abandoned this right-minded practice? Is it because we are more developed? Or is it because this is our signature ‘Truly Asia’ way of doing things?

Hopefully the people responsible for all such decisions will review the practice or at least educate us as to why they think it is a brighter idea to do garbage collection when citizens and migrant workers by the tens of thousands, are getting ready to report for work?

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