A nightmare that has haunted leaders of Birmingham City Council’s Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition since June 2004 has turned from a scary dream into unremitting reality.
The binmen have been on strike and are now working to rule, resulting in the emotive sight of thousands of black bags of rotting rubbish piled high across city streets waiting for the arrival of “scab” casual staff who are being paid by the council to break the industrial action.
By any measure, the recruitment of some 200 freelance refuse collectors has not been a great success. The outcome that the local authority’s leadership hoped at all costs to avoid – mountains of rat-infested sacks – is a common sight as Birmingham enters 2011.
It is easy to see why the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat partners are so edgy about the binmen, since virtually every resident satisfaction survey there has ever been places clean streets and promptly collected bins as a major priority, ahead even of tackling crime and providing decent schools.
Well-run cities, which Birmingham claims to be, do not descend into Winter of Discontent scenes leading to the collapse of essential public services.
So when the binmen cunningly chose the Monday before Christmas for a strike, knowing that the following two Mondays were bank holidays when they would not be prepared to work and collect the backlog of rubbish, the council reverted to its default macho-position loudly rejecting media reports that thousands of householders would not have their rubbish collected for a month.
As things turned out, due to a combination of industrial action, severe snow, and a lack of trained drivers among the casual staff, many people still have not had their bins collected since the second week in December. With the work to rule continuing, the backlog of rubbish is proving stubbornly difficult to clear.
It is worth recalling how the council managed to find itself in such a mess, although the answers go back to the 1980s when Labour ran Birmingham.
Faced by exorbitant wage demands from the binmen and the ever-present threat of industrial action, council leaders at the time introduced a series of “bonus” payments that almost doubled the binmen’s take-home pay.
These cash sums were handed over for simply turning up for work and bore no relation whatsoever to improved productivty. They were nothing more than massive wage rises through the back door.
Such payments broke equal pay laws even then, although the council benefitted from the trade unions’ chauvinistic decision to turn a blind eye and not to pursue compensation claims on behalf of low-paid women workers who were being denied the binmen’s sweetheart bonuses.
