In Japan students are expected to clean their schools. It's not looked down upon; everyone has a shared responsibility for spaces they utilize. Cultivating that kind of environment leads to a cleaner society in general. One could easily imagine rotating janitorial/firefighter/etc shifts for able-bodied citizens the way we expect people to answer jury summons.
There are ways to motivate people beyond the purely economic, even if it runs counter to our upbringing.
Nobody becomes a janitor to become wealthy or successful, so wealth and success are not what motivates people today to become janitors.
> Japan
In the army, we were required to clean our own barracks; the janitorial work wasn't contracted out. Shared spaces were on a rotating shift. It still sucked. Believe me, nobody was volunteering for extra shifts of the shared spaces.
My argument is that society has some needs that are unfulfillable if you simply expect that ordinary people will pick up the slack, because it's the kind of work that people find distasteful.
Consider when garbage collection worker unions go on strike, and garbage starts to pile up and up because it's no longer being hauled away. Surely people are motivated to solve that problem because having piles of trash everywhere is disgusting. Surely people would be respected by their neighbors for solving the problem. But does anyone lift a finger and say, I'm happy to volunteer my time taking my trash and my neighbors' trash to the dump so that our streets will be clean? Does anyone say, oh I wish I could do that for myself and my neighbors', and the only reason I'm not is because I respect the union's strike?
It's the same thing in companies, by the way. There's no such real thing as self-managed teams. Anywhere that tries, if you inspect the work put out by those teams, you will almost invariably find that people have cut corners on the aspects of the job which they think are boring or stupid or otherwise distasteful. It is incredibly rare to find people who have the integrity to not only have a standard but to hold themselves to that standard.
The main feature is that workers collectively run workplaces, municipalities, regions and ultimately the state. The rest of the details are up to said workers to work out among themselves.
