| In its simplest terms, the bin strike in Birmingham is the result of the council’s plans to eliminate the role of waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO), leaving 170 workers facing a potential pay cut of £8,000 a year. After intermittent industrial action from January, an all-out, indefinite strike began last month after the council started using temporary labour to replace the striking crew members. As the strike has worn on, and the rubbish has piled up, the story has become a national issue – partly because of the dramatic images of streets overflowing with waste, and partly because it feels like a parable of what happens as local services get worse even as council tax increases. “There is always the feeling with this kind of thing that the national press is descending on the city, and suddenly everyone wants a story about Birmingham,” Kate Knowles said. “But at the same time, people here are incredibly frustrated. It’s definitely a crisis.” How bad is the situation? The strike has been going on for more than a month now, and in that time increasing quantities of rubbish have been piling up in parts of the city. Residents report unsanitary waste overflowing from bin bags that have been gnawed at by rats; the backlog of waste is growing by about 1,000 tonnes a week; and last week the council declared a major incident, with more than 17,000 tonnes of uncollected rubbish on the streets. While some of the more apocalyptic reporting feels a bit like it’s been sensationalised to get clicks – “cannibal rats as big as cats could attack your kids,” apparently, and “a new influx of rat babies” is about to hit the city – there is no doubt that the problem is real. “As well as it just being disgusting, there are definitely health concerns,” Knowles said. “When you have rubbish piling up like this, it’s not going to be long until pests come.” How did it get to this point? While the council’s determination to get rid of the WRCO role is the proximate cause of the strikes, as James Tapper wrote for the Observer, “that’s as simplistic as saying the first world war was caused by the killing of an archduke”. The causes go back to 2017, when the council resolved a previous bin strike by creating a new role with additional responsibilities that paid up to £8,000 more than loaders on the back of the carts got. But, in fact, those responsibilities – such as logging data on a tablet on each round – quickly disappeared, and were determined at an employment tribunal to be a way to pay some of the workers more without any real change to their duties. That is a big issue in Birmingham because ever since it lost a landmark equal pay claim in 2012, the council has been paying out huge sums in compensation – £1.1bn by 2023, enough to effectively bankrupt the council. WRCO workers, unlike administrators, are largely male. “That opened up the possibility of those other workers, who are much more likely to be women, to say: hang on a second, they’re on the same pay grade, but they’re getting more than me,” Knowles said. “So there is clearly an equal pay issue.” Eliminating the WRCO role is an attempt to head off those kinds of claims: the council’s finances are so bad that it isn’t seen as feasible to raise the pay of women in equivalent desk jobs instead. Who is being affected? Pictures on pieces about the bin strike (er, including this one) naturally focus on the most seriously affected areas, but in fact the problem is unevenly distributed, Knowles said. “I’m spending most of my time in the city centre and my own neighbourhood, which aren’t that badly affected, so I’m not coming into contact with huge mounds of rubbish every day. On the other hand, a colleague of mine looked out of his window to see someone throwing bin bags over his fence. In the specific areas that are dealing with it, it’s really bad.” Some of that difference appears to be linked to socioeconomic status, with more deprived areas like Sparkhill and Handsworth much more garbage-strewn than leafy Edgbaston, for example. “Some of the worst affected areas are places where there’s already a problem with fly-tipping, and those parts of the city tend to be a bit poorer,” Knowles said. Then there’s the fact that people with cars are much more able to take their rubbish to the dump than those without – and that poorer areas tend to be more densely populated, increasing the volume of rubbish. Who is responsible? Health secretary Wes Streeting yesterday accused Unite, the affected workers’ union, of “totally unacceptable” behaviour in blocking bin lorries from leaving the depot. Those who are sympathetic to the council’s position argue that the terms on offer to the affected workers are reasonable. “They’ve been offered alternative roles, or the chance to train to be a driver, which is a higher grade, or a voluntary redundancy package,” Knowles said. “So there are people who say, what are you complaining about?” But, she pointed out, most of these workers are on £24,000 to £26,000, well below the median wage. And there aren’t enough vacancies for everyone to retrain: the alternative is a more junior role and a cut of £6,000 to £8,000 a year. There is also a robust argument that central government bears a large share of the responsibility, with the legacy of austerity-era cuts to council budgets a central factor. On the other hand, the financial crisis that the council faces is also the product of mismanagement – and council tax has gone up significantly to try to shore up the balance sheet, which makes the anger even more severe. “If you were to ask someone in the street, most of the time the blame would be directed at the council,” Knowles said. “It’s seen as just another thing that’s gone wrong on their watch.” Is enough being done to resolve it? The latest round of talks broke up yesterday without resolution. But as well as wanting the two sides to reach a deal, there is a view that national politicians bear a share of responsibility. “There’s a sense that the government haven’t prioritised Birmingham,” Knowles said. “There were hopes when Labour was elected that there would be a financial rescue package, but that hasn’t materialised. A lot of people ask whether, if it was happening in London, it would have been allowed to go on this long.” Ministers like Streeting have focused their criticisms on the union rather than the Labour council, while the Tories have accused the government of not going after the union aggressively enough. While local government secretary Angela Rayner met council leader John Cotton at the weekend, the government has warned that no deal can be struck that “potentially compromises the equal pay settlement”. And, Knowles said: “Local MPs have definitely faced criticism for not doing enough to get the government to take decisive action.” “There are so many memes about how crap Birmingham is,” she added. “We’re used to being ridiculed. You’ve had Andy Street [the former mayor of the West Midlands] saying that there is now going to be a job to build the city’s reputation again. I don’t think most people are that bothered about all that, to be honest. We just want our city to function. We don’t want to pay sky-high rates for services that don’t work.” | 