The World Toilet Organisation is pioneering an effort that will
bring the sparkle into toilet cleaning jobs.
It is setting up the world's very first Toilet College in
Singapore.
Toilet cleaning has long been bogged down by low pay, low morale
and low image.
Meet Mr Liu, a 65-year-old toilet cleaner who makes just $500 a
month.
"We must clean it very well, there must be no faeces, not a trace
of urine, and no bad odour," he said.
But sometimes, that can be a daunting task.
Mr Liu said: "Sometimes some elderly people can't make it to the
toilet in time, just take off their soiled trousers and dump them
here. Once, I almost threw up because the man threw it in the
toilet and clogged up the whole thing. I had to use my hands to dig
up the soiled trousers and throw it away."
The World Toilet Organisation hopes to change all that.
Cleaners will be given hands-on training at its new Toilet College,
which promises to change the scope and perception of toilet related
jobs.
Funded partly by government agencies, its courses will teach
cleaners to use new equipment and techniques from Japan in which
cleaners are given full ownership of their toilets.
Jack Sim, president of World Toilet Organisation, said: "We are
going to train the toilet cleaners to upgrade himself or herself to
a level where he or she can take care of the entire toilet,
including changing bulbs, repairing locks, repairing leaky taps,
doing periodical heavy cleaning, technical cleaning, taking away
urine salt inside the toilet and recommending changes to the toilet
layout."
When re-entering the workforce, the newly skilled restroom
specialists will see their salaries increase to over a $1,000 a
month.
Classes will be held at the Republic Polytechnic, and will begin in
October for the first batch of 30 cleaners from a local cleaning
company.
But the school hopes to reach out to a much wider student
base.
So it's also offering a course on ecological sanitation to teach
volunteers how to cater to sanitation needs in rural and disaster
stricken areas.
Mr Sim said: "There are 2.6 billion people in the world who have no
toilets, they are toilet-less and what we are trying to do is to
build capacity for field engineers to go down to the farms, to the
rural areas, to build ecological sanitation."
A course on toilet design and architecture is in the pipeline for
next year.
With more courses, the Toilet College hopes to make toilets, quite
rightly, everybody's business. - CNA/ir