Nurse, petrol station attendant and rubbish collector are joint first, with the government minister in fourth.
Imagine 652 days without any nurses. Obviously, significant excess deaths would occur.
Imagine 652 days without petrol station attendants. Lorries that deliver food, ambulances, fire engines and many other essential vehicles wouldn’t be able to get fuel leading to significant excess deaths from various different causes.
Imagine 652 days without rubbish being collected. The streets would fill with garbage leading to immensely unsanitary conditions in built-up areas causing significant excess deaths from communicable diseases that normally are no problem.
Belgium has demonstrated that a modern Western democracy can function for more than a year and nine months without an elected government.
Society simply can’t function without a wide range of essential roles being filled, yet so many people doing what are often considered menial jobs aren’t sufficiently rewarded for their work, despite their importance to society.
You can learn more about that and how every role in society is vitally important, even if they don’t seem so, in Some Of Us Are Warriors.
N.B. You may feel the order of the jobs should be different and you may be correct. However, unless there’s an exceptional emergency that requires government ministers, society will be able to survive for a much longer period without ministers than any of the three other jobs.
The salaries were estimates from various online sources at the time I wrote this and may not be 100% accurate.