Refuse workers in Britain's second city have been on strike for several months, and there is no resolution in sight
Why is this important?
Birmingham is the UK's second-largest city, with a population of 1.1 million. Its local authority, Birmingham City Council, is the biggest in Europe. It employs about 735 refuse workers, and regularly uses up to 500 agency staff. Its directly employed refuse workers began walkouts in January, and have been on all-out strike since 11 March, leaving its inhabitants without regular rubbish collection. By April, there were more than 17,000 tonnes of uncollected rubbish on the streets, and the council was forced to declare a "major incident" in order to get some of the backlog cleared, with help from other local authorities and Army logistics experts. Talks aimed at ending the strike have gone nowhere, resulting in a major political headache for the government and woe for the residents of Birmingham.
Why are they striking?
It's a tangled and contentious issue. The spark was the elimination of the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO) role. Most bin lorries in the UK are manned by a driver and two loaders. In Birmingham they used to have an extra loader, a WRCO, who collected data on a tablet computer, nicknamed "the slab in the cab". The council pays its drivers £33,366 to £40,476; bin loaders £24,027 to £25,992; WRCOs are in the middle, earning £26,409 to £32,654. According to the union Unite, the phasing out of the WRCO role will leave around 170 bin workers worse off by up to £8,000 a year. Unite also believes that the move will strip "essential safety expertise" from "an often dirty and dangerous job". The council disputes the figures, saying that only 17 people stand to lose a smaller maximum sum, of "just over £6,000", and that WRCOs have never had an important health and safety role.
Who's right?
On the size of the pay cut, the council's figures are more realistic, according to calculations by BBC Verify. However, that's still a cut of at least 18%. The numbers affected are harder to adjudicate. And on the bigger picture, the two sides seem irreconcilable. Unite says the council is trying to "fire and rehire": demoting its workers, paying them less, threatening further redundancies, trying to fob them off with false offers of retraining (not all WRCOs would be able to take up the council's offer of retraining as a driver, because there are a limited number of bin lorries). There may be some truth in this: in July, 200 drivers were also told their roles would be downgraded, with lower pay, and around 130 staff were at risk of redundancy. For its part, the council argues that it needs to keep costs low; that no other bin service in the UK has a WRCO role; and that the role is legally untenable.
Why is it legally untenable?
It appears the WRCO role was created as a result of a previous strike in 2017. There's a strong suspicion it was created as a dispute-resolving fudge for channelling extra pay to binmen. And in a landmark series of legal cases that began in 2010, Birmingham council was found to have discriminated against women, by awarding bonuses and other perks to mostly male employees such as refuse workers, but not to caterers, cleaners and other mostly female employees. The council now wants to "eliminate any future equal pay risk": it has paid out at least £1 billion in equal pay claims – a major reason it had to issue a Section 114 notice in 2023.
What's a Section 114 notice?
Local authorities can't go bankrupt, but if their expenditure is about to exceed their income, they're required to make a formal declaration, known as a Section 114 notice, and ask for help from central government. Thanks partly to equal pay liabilities, partly to vast cost overruns on a large IT project, and partly to the long-term underfunding of local government, Birmingham had to do that in September 2023. Rishi Sunak's government appointed a team of commissioners to oversee the council for five years. In the same year, Labour's national ruling body unilaterally installed its own choices as council leader and deputy leader. As a result, the council's leadership is viewed with suspicion by many in Birmingham.
Is there no hope of negotiating a compromise?
Apparently not. The council is adamant that WRCOs had to go for equal-pay reasons; that it needs to rationalise its waste service; and that it has "reached the absolute limit" of what it can offer. Talks broke down in early July, when it said it was "walking away". Unite is adamant that the council is being evasive about its cost-cutting aims, and the union has expanded its original complaint to cover the council's use of agency workers during the strike. Unite's leader, Sharon Graham, has also accused the government of failing to stand up for workers' rights, focusing her fire particularly on Angela Rayner, who urged the union to accept the council's offer. On 11 July, Unite symbolically suspended Rayner, and Graham has spoken repeatedly of reconsidering the union's funding of the Labour Party.
Is rubbish being collected now?
From March to May, the situation was often described as "apocalyptic", with streets filled with rotting rubbish and "rats the size of cats". Since then, things have improved. The council has used agencies to provide a skeleton staff, paying firms supplying agency workers nearly £8 million this year to run collections (more than double its agency spending the year before). However, there are still serious problems: the refuse lorries are regularly disrupted by picketing at the depots, which has led to a new court battle and further bad blood. Rat infestations are still rife. Recycling is, for the time being, not collected at all. Poorer, inner-city areas are the most affected, because they are more densely populated, and residents are less likely to have access to cars for driving to the dump. Refuse workers, meanwhile, are subsisting on strike pay, reportedly of about £70 per day.
A day in the life of a refuse collector
"It's long days – you'll walk more than 12 miles," Tony Spiezick of Coventry City Council told The Times's Stephen Bleach when the latter spent a day as a binman. "It's smelly, it's dangerous, it's physically demanding. It's proper, old-school hard graft. Thankless, too – people only notice you when things go wrong. And the rats – I've known crews to be literally dodging the rats as they fly through air."
A typical day for a Birmingham refuse collector begins at 5am or 6am. The driver arrives at the depot first, to get the vehicle ready. Then the team sets off on the round. The daily target is around 1,500 properties. There is a 15-minute break at around 9am, and a 30-minute lunch break at 12pm. The round finishes around 3pm. In between, the binmen will load about 12 tonnes of rubbish. There are dangers, too: if you are pulled into the lifting mechanism, it can cause serious injury or death. The public can be aggressive – particularly motorists trapped behind slow-moving dustcarts. Binmen say the worst day of the week is a Monday, because hungry rats have had the chance to settle down undisturbed over the weekend in full bins. Outside restaurants, it's best to give the bins a sharp knock before moving them.
