Are the Romani lazy?
Are the Romani lazy?
Addressing myths about the Roma work ethic
A prevailing stereotype about the Romani is that they do not like working and avoid it at all costs. The narrative around this is cyclical and hits the same 3 points:
The Romani are thieves by nature and prefer theft to hard work.
The Romani abuse the social benefits system and have many children with the purpose of collecting larger amounts of child benefits.
They are lazy and like to just sit around all day.
So are the Romani lazy? People who say that use some very specific and narrow observations as evidence for what is, essentially, a racial stereotype.
They see the Roma street cleaners hiding in the shade or having a coffee and think, “There they are, sitting around, instead of cleaning the streets.” What they don’t see is how they’ve already done the bulk of the work while everyone else was asleep at 6:00 AM.
They see them going through trash and think, “There they are, parasitizing off of us again.” What they don’t see is the back-breaking but intricate culture of recycling and renewal in the hidden Roma world.
The Romani are not lazy. The Romani never take a single day off.
A brief peak at history
Here in Bulgaria, people like to say “During Communism, the Gypsies were at least working! They were all lined up in factories and were contributing to society. And now…”
In the four decades of satelliting for the Soviet Union, Bulgaria had a contradictory approach towards its Roma minority. For a time, there was a boom in Roma culture and activism. A Roma newspaper, Roma theaters, recognized Roma musicians, activists, writers. Then, this was all scrapped and the government refused to even acknowledge the existence of the Romani. Under the contorted idea of unity, the official narrative declared that “We are all Bulgarian” so there are no Romani, no Turks, no one else, no one different. In a Nazi-like effort to jolt the confidence of Bulgarians back to life, Muslim communities had their names changed and were gradually torn apart.
The part about the Romani being lined up in factories, however, is the only part of our Soviet-era history that people like to remember nowadays. But these years were a blip, dwarfed by the ten centuries during which Roma culture has been in existence.
And this culture has survived relentless persecution for these ten centuries because it has maintained a very strong sense of identity. Identity based on two things: family and craft.
The Romani organized themselves, before all else, in groups defined by craft. Brick-makers, comb-makers, basket-makers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, herb gatherers, horse traders, musicians, to name just a few.
Having honed their skills generation after generation, the Romani were considered master craftsmen and artists in the Middle Ages. They have forged weapons for armies, built houses for villagers, played music at innumerable weddings.
From “Why have the Romani been scapegoated for a thousand years?”
Here in Bulgaria, entire Roma communities have been displaced, destroyed, and melted together into ghettos. Their crafts, sense of identity, and pride in their ancestral skills: long forgotten.
Street cleaning: the “default” Roma career path
Wiping streets, unloading garbage cans, removing the snow in the winter and the fallen wet leaves in autumn, hosing down boulevards during the night: in Bulgaria, this is low-class, underpaid labor reserved for the Romani. Society considers it the only thing they are good for because they are seen as illiterate and unskilled. While many Romani are able to get a good education and overcome the innumerable obstacles the system has erected against them, they are still seen as an exception and “not like the real Gypsies.”
When Martina and Pepi got together, the first shock Martina experienced was a call Pepi received from his boss at 3:00 AM.
“It’s snowing,” she said. “You have to come in.”
This was nothing new for Pepi or for anyone in his community. When it snows, everyone is called in early, to make sure the streets are clear before the city wakes up. This overtime labor is taken for granted and nobody gets paid for it.
This job is minimum wage. It’s dangerous as multiple injuries and accidents happen because people are expected to work in all weather conditions and on boulevards regardless of how heavy the traffic is. There is no protection for them - not physical, not in the form of adequate labor conditions. Depending on the company, you get four to six days off per month. Missing one day of work is penalized with a fine that exceeds twice the daily wage.
But if you ask Pepi’s boss - or any person in a managerial position in these companies - the Romani are the real problem here. They’re seen as unreliable because they sometimes skip work, come late, or leave on the spot without giving notice.
“What if you had a job where the pay reflects your efforts and your boss treats you with respect?” Martina asked Pepi.
“I would work overtime every single day,” he said.
Broken things in the trash: the Roma “side hustle”
What we, in mainstream society, throw away is either something we consider useless or something we’ve replaced with a newer shinier version. In the latter case, people here in Bulgaria, feel a resistance in this valuable item ending up in the hands of a Roma person. They prefer to find a “more suitable” owner or “someone in need.” The useless thing, however, they are generous about. In fact, people leave out broken tools and appliances and old furniture specifically because they know the Romani will take that off their hands.
To the Romani, the entire concept of trash is flipped like in a mirror. What is thrown out as useless is what they spin into gold - with a lot of hard work and a lot of patience. And what is still usable as-is - clothes, a phone, jewelry - is incorporated into the unsentimental flow of life where ownership is fluid.
Frying pans, old phones and tablets, cutlery, tiny brass components in appliances, and more, are collected piece by piece, bit by bit, and then carried by foot or in a horse-driven cart to scrap shops. The materials are inspected and weighed in their “pure” form. If you’re selling brass, you have to remove everything that is not brass. If you’re selling copper, then you’re removing everything that isn’t copper.
Once the material is weighed, you get paid.
Nobody is making bank with this work. But when done consistently, you earn more than at the street cleaning job.
And we arrive at the true answer to the question “Are the Romani lazy?”
The Romani never take a day off
The workday starts early in the Roma world. Before sunrise, they are up, their first coffee already a distant memory. When they finish work sometime after 1:00 PM, they don’t go home and collapse after a back-breaking shift. They have another coffee, a bite to eat, and then off they go to hustle. If they have one of the rare days off from their job, then they still start from the early morning. The hustle can take many forms. Collecting material for scrap is always a given. Repairing and reselling broken electronics and tools. Helping people with renovations or issues in their homes and getting paid far less than an “official repairman.” Helping grocery stores stock up and move deliveries. The list is endless, and no two days are alike.
“Lying down to relax is like dying,” Pepi says.
He means that very literally. If you don’t hustle, every single day, then your survival is at risk. Perpetually underpaid and discriminated against, the Romani have learned to rely on themselves and only themselves. Their psyche does not occupy the modern world of comfort. They are much more connected with the ancient reality of hunter-gatherers where if you stay in one day you might end up without food.
Even if in this very moment they are stable, with a stocked-up fridge, and money stashed away, their bones implore them to keep hustling.
“If I don’t bring something in, it’s a wasted day,” Pepi said. “Even if I only bring one loaf of bread, or one broken pan for scrap, I need to bring something into the house. Or I am useless.”
Many people of Roma origins accomplish great things by the measurement of mainstream society. There are countless Roma academics, artists, politicians, activists, doctors, engineers.
Society likes to ignore their existence or treat them as a miraculous exception.
But even if we pretend they don’t exist, even in today’s dystopian reality for the Romani where their ancestral crafts have been put to the fire and entire communities are surviving with low-wage back-breaking work, even then the Roma contribution to society is invaluable. Unseen, unacknowledged, underpaid, looked down upon, mocked even. But invaluable. They live in stark contrast to mainstream consumerism and excess. And every single day they sort away and make better the very things we refuse to look at.