The desk lamp in a newsroom in Dhaka flickers at 2:00 AM, casting long, fatigued shadows across pages of investigative drafts, while a weary educator in a rural government primary school in Kurigram corrects her 400th exam paper by the dim glow of a mobile phone torch.
Down the street, a municipal sanitation worker clears choked drains before dawn, unseen and unacknowledged by the waking city.
In the architecture of modern civilization, certain labour operates like the foundation of a building -- buried deep underground, taking the crushing weight of the entire structure, yet entirely forgotten until something breaks.
These are the thankless jobs.
Within the specific and high-stakes context of Bangladesh, the phrase "thankless job" takes on a sharp, almost harrowing edge.
To understand what truly constitutes a thankless job, we must look beyond the mere absence of praise.
A genuinely thankless job is defined by a paradox: Its practitioners bear the immense burden of sustaining societal truth, social mobility, and public health, yet they are systematically met with suspicion, ridicule, intimidation, and prosecution at whim.
What makes a job truly thankless? It is not merely low pay -- though financial precarity is almost always a faithful companion. Rather, it is the fundamental asymmetry between the liability one carries and the dignity one is afforded.
The journalist: Walking a tightrope of peril
Consider the journalist, particularly within the sociopolitical landscape of Bangladesh.
Journalism is ostensibly framed as the "fourth estate," a pillar of democracy. In reality, practicing independent journalism here often feels like walking a tightrope over an active volcano.
When a reporter uncovers systemic corruption in public procurement, financial sector anomalies, or bureaucratic inertia, the immediate reaction from the powerful is rarely introspection or reform.
Instead, it is a knee-jerk defense mechanism characterized by hostility. Journalists are routinely questioned, ridiculed in public forums, intimidated by non-state actors, and prosecuted under draconian legal instruments -- such as legacy cyber-security or digital safety laws that weaponize ambiguity against the press.
The public consumes the news with morning tea, often criticizing the media for being "biased" or "sensationalist," while remaining entirely insulated from the physical threats, midnight summons, and psychological toll borne by reporters in district towns and metropolitan hubs alike.
The journalist labours under a relentless cloud of hostility, where doing the job correctly makes you an enemy of those you hold accountable.
The frontline pillars
This dynamic extends far beyond the newsroom.
A thankless job, therefore, is one where society demands perfection, absorbs the immense value produced, and repays the worker with vulnerability, disrespect, and peril.
Why thankless jobs are the cogs of societal survival
It is easy to dismiss these professions as unfortunate casualties of economic inequality.
However, a deeper sociological examination reveals a chilling truth: Society runs smoothly precisely because these jobs are thankless.
The structural thanklessness of these roles is often the mechanism by which power dynamics are maintained and societal friction is absorbed. Without them, the veneer of order collapses.
To understand why the thankless job of the journalist is non-negotiable for a functioning society, we can look at a journalistic anecdote.
In the early 2020s, local investigative reports in regional Bangladeshi newspapers highlighted how syndicates were artificially inflating prices of essential commodities at local haats (traditional markets) through cartelization.
The journalists who broke these stories faced intense local pressure, threats of physical assault from local political muscle, and frivolous defamation lawsuits designed to bankrupt them legally.
Why did powerful vested interests react with such venom? Because journalism acts as society’s immune system.
When a pathogen (corruption, abuse of power, systemic theft) enters the body politic, the immune system attacks it. This process is inherently inflammatory and painful.
If journalists were thanked, coddled, and protected by the establishment, it would mean the establishment welcomed self-correction. But power rarely welcomes correction.
By making journalism thankless, a society attempts to suppress its own immune response.
Yet, without that painful, thankless reporting, the socioeconomic body rots from within.
Unchecked corruption drains national reserves, banking sectors hollow out, and inflation crushes the working class.
The journalist's thankless persistence is the only barrier preventing total systemic opacity.
Similarly, the thankless labour of the teacher is the glue holding social mobility together. In a developing economy like Bangladesh, education is the primary elevator out of intergenerational poverty.
When teachers in under-resourced classrooms dedicate their evenings to counseling struggling students or managing massive administrative burdens without adequate support, they are quietly absorbing the failures of the state's social welfare apparatus.
If teaching were truly valued and supported commensurate with its actual impact, resource allocation would shift dramatically.
By keeping the profession underpaid, overworked, and structurally unappreciated, the system manages to extract maximum emotional and intellectual labour at minimal cost -- treating educators as martyrs of necessity rather than professionals of value.
The Bangladeshi context and the path forward
In Bangladesh, the cultural narrative surrounding labour is often tied to visible, tangible production -- garments manufactured, bridges built, remittances sent from the Middle East.
These are celebrated, and rightly so; they drive the macroeconomic indicators.
However, the invisible labour -- the journalistic truth-telling, the foundational teaching, the municipal sanitation -- operates in the cultural blind spot.
We celebrate the ribbon-cuttings of mega-infrastructure projects, but we rarely protect or thank the journalists who investigate the structural integrity of those projects, nor the low-tier engineers and supervisors who blow the whistle on substandard materials at personal risk.
When we punish or ignore those in thankless jobs, we induce a profound societal brain drain and moral apathy.
Talented youth steer clear of investigative journalism, public school teaching, and civil rights advocacy, preferring safer, more lucrative corporate or bureaucratic tracks where compliance is rewarded over conscience.
A society that consumes the fruits of a thankless job while starving, intimidating, or prosecuting the tree-tender is borrowing prosperity from its own future.
True reform in Bangladesh requires a cultural and structural pivot. It demands legal safeguards that protect journalists from arbitrary prosecution, fair compensation and social prestige for educators, and basic human dignity for frontline workers.
Until we recognize that the health of a nation is measured not just by its tall buildings and export volumes, but by how it treats those who bear its heaviest and most unrewarded crosses, our progress will remain fragile -- built on the exhausted backs of those we refuse to thank.
Wafiur Rahman looks after the business desk at Dhaka Tribune.