On the Social Fringe: Colombo’s Street Cleaners are Marginalised and Trapped in Precariousness

By Prashanthi Jayasekara

On 16 October 2015

Colombo’s street cleaners are part of a large informal sector that remains on the margins of our society. They are the foot soldiers employed by large conglomerates and the Colombo’s Municipal Council to clean up the waste of some 600,000 of the city’s residents — daily, with no excuses for adverse weather. A 2015 CEPA study reveals the ways in which they are entangled in a complex web of social, economic and political structures that exclude them from power and keep them entrapped in poverty and multiple vulnerabilities.

The vast majority of street cleaners in Colombo belong to the increasingly expanding unorganised sector. Most of them are not entitled to any form of leave — paid, medical or otherwise — and statutory benefits such as EPF, ETF and pensions. Apart from the daily wage and an occasional overtime allowance, they do not receive any form of social security benefits. Often they don’t even have a letter of appointment or Terms of Reference (TOR), and receive no training prior to commencing work.

Informal employment accounts for roughly 66 percent of total employment in the labour market in Sri Lanka.  The growth of informal jobs indicates that despite the fact that the economy has ‘flourished’ over the years, it hasn’t necessarily contributed to decent employment creation. A class-based analysis by CEPA highlights how the labour market excludes the poorest and the most vulnerable economic classes, to which a large number of casual wage workers belong.

The conditions in the informal sector raise particularly worrying concerns due to employment arrangements, since a major proportion of this work is temporary and casual in nature, with nearly 94 percent of informal workers lacking job security.

There is little social recognition of the value of street cleaners. Consequently, they experience social exclusion, prejudice, harassment and verbal insults. Often, they are required to sit separately at road-side eateries and restricted socially in hospitals and elsewhere in the community. The social discrimination they are subjected to is due to the nature of their work which, in turn, is a composite of exclusion based on class, gender, ethnicity and caste.

Employers and clients often treat them harshly and verbally abuse them. Such harsh treatments reflect the lack of dignity attributed to the service the workers provide. The workers’ lack of bargaining power and the insensitivity towards workers’ economic, social and emotional well-being runs contrary to creating an enabling environment that ensures the workers’ multiple dimensions of security. Prior research on waste pickers find that they are treated as nuisances by authorities and with displeasure by the public, and they are often absent from public policies. They are also vulnerable to violence, exploitation and intimidation by intermediaries.

The nature of their work is such that it does not allow freedom of association, thereby excluding them from participating in any form of social dialogue with their employers, with regard to the terms and conditions of their employment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that gendered violence, inherent in the work of female street cleaners, is scripted into their livelihoods by capitalist and patriarchal structures.

Studies conducted in Bangalore and New Delhi find that these workers are vulnerable to respiratory illnesses, dysentery, parasites and malnutrition, as they are often forced to work without gloves, boots or masks to protect lungs from the toxic fumes they inhale day and night, in hazardous working conditions. This also indicates a lack of awareness of the health hazards related to their work; and in some cases, a sense of submission to their disadvantaged position.

The 2015 CEPA study sheds light on the malnutrition, homelessness, and multiple vulnerabilities these workers experience, in spite of their hard, dedicated, and efficient work. In the capitalist model, such virtues are expected to create a self-made individual who lifts him/herself out of poverty to conspicuous wealth through nothing more than hard work, or work without the help of anyone else.

However, the precarious life conditions of street cleaners in Sri Lanka suggest the opposite. Despite their hard work, they are entangled in a complex web of social, economic, and political relations that work against their upward mobility, and thwart their efforts to emerge from the precarious conditions in which they live.

Poverty and precariousness are injustices. They are proof that structures and systems of power have failed a subsection of society, not to mention the distressing futility of policies intended to help them.

Originally published in the LMD October Issue