That’s why most of them these days refer to themselves as sanitation engineers or whatever else. Sounds better to the uneducated and judgmental masses, and is more accurate anyway.

Current society puts so much emphasis on appearances and not nearly enough on what jobs are actually vital to social harmony. Trash collection and other sanitation jobs -should- be high-prestige high-paid jobs, simply because of how crappy they are to do and how indispensable they are to social functionality. There is no universe in which being a sportsball coach is more vital to society than sanitation work, yet sportsball coaches at almost any level are paid far better and have far more prestige. Instead we collectively treat sanitation workers like shit, mock them for doing a dirty job we certainly wouldn’t be willing to do, without which we would all die quite horribly from infections and disease…

Me ex’s dad was the mechanic for the city dump. Not just collecting trash but crawling under and fixing the very dirty trucks used to collect it. He was an odd duck and would salvage all sorts of stuff, but his very gross very dirty job kept 25,000 people from living in filth. That’s super important. Especially since we’ve largely forgotten how to live without constantly generating waste.