The unseen costs of dirty work

THE TERM “dirty work” was coined by Everett Hughes, an American sociologist, to capture the attitudes of ordinary Germans to the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Hughes used it to convey the idea of something immoral but conveniently distant, activities that were tacitly endorsed by the public but that could also be disavowed by them. The term has since come to embrace a wide array of jobs, in particular those that are essential but stigmatised, both crucial to society and kept at arm’s length from it.