I live in Vietnam and get to see the rubbish truck go past my house every day exactly as the person above you described. It's summer time here, 35-40 degrees and high humidity every day. One person drives the truck, the other two go through people bins and sort their rubbish, extracting the recycling since nobody here has the habit of separating their waste. I don't know the exact wage of these guys, but judging from other government jobs it's probably around 3 million VND/month (~$130), slightly less than $1600 a year, and it's likely they work 6 days a week.

Food and rent is cheap here, but not that cheap. You can barely survive on that wage, especially if you have a family. You will be eating mostly rice and probably scrounging for other work on the grey market.

In Iceland, you'll get at least minimum wage, $2500 a month, ~$30,000 a year. Of course, the economies are different. However, using PPP (purchasing power parity) [1], Iceland minimum wage would be equivalent to around $13,000 a year in Vietnam, or 8 times a garbage collector's pay here, for significantly easier work and less hours.

I'm not trying to say that you had it easy, or that it was OK to pay you that amount for such long shifts and to stiff you on overtime. However, by objective comparison people working equivalent jobs in developing countries have it much, much, worse.

[1] https://partnersontheroad.com/salary-comparison-city-country...