Birmingham City Council has declared a ‘major incident’ over its ongoing bin strike. Rubbish is piling up in the streets, rats are making the headlines and what was once a leading contender for this country’s second city is making the news as a basket case. More than it usually does, anyway.
The origin of the dispute is, of course, the absurd equal pay ruling which bankrupted the council a couple of years ago, in which it was decreed by a judge that it had discriminated against thousands of (largely female) administrative and clerical staff by paying the (largely male) refuse-collection workers more money.
Part of that is down to a basic flaw in the way we structure the public sector, i.e. the existence of pay ‘bands’, which gave the clerical staff a bureaucratic case that they were doing the same work. But that simply compounded the fundamental problem of having the price of a commodity (for such is labour) set by judicial decree.
It is not hard to see for what reason, other than prejudice, Birmingham’s binmen (and binwomen) ended up on higher wages. Refuse collection is, for obvious reasons – unsociable hours and physically handling rubbish, for example – less attractive than office work. We should therefore expect it to command a pay premium on those grounds alone.
Add the facts that the refuse workers were well-organised by their union and had a lot of leverage (for reasons clearly illustrated by coverage of the latest strike) and you have the pay disparity that got the council into trouble.
Thus, the ‘equal’ pay ruling that crippled Birmingham’s finances amounted to the administrative workers free-riding on decades of industrial organisation and negotiating effort by the refuse workers, as well the state attempting to fix the price of labour at an arbitrary point, the unexpected (but perfectly predictable) consequence of which is the current strike.
Why? Because in order to limit or end its exposure to future equal pay challenges, the council needs to change the terms of work for the refuse collectors – who, being well-organised and having a lot of leverage, are not inclined to accept. At the same time, the city can’t simply buy off the strikers because a) it is bankrupt but b) because any settlement would also need to be paid out to thousands of other workers not involved in the dispute.
But what if that huge pool of profiteering litigants – some 6,000 strong, by all appearances – could actually be the magic key to clearing the streets of Birmingham of the mountains of rubbish (17,000 tonnes and counting) mounting daily outside homes and businesses?
Birmingham Council is trying to avoid calling in outside assistance. Declaring a ‘major incident’ was a way of freeing up internal resources, allowing it to ‘increase its street cleaning operation and fly-tipping removal, by bringing in an extra 35 vehicles and crews’. That is obviously welcome, but it will take a long time for such a relatively small commitment to make a dent in the problem, if indeed it can. But it would surely take a force of hundreds to fix the problem – thousands, even.
But, you might protest, there is no such force. Yet have not 6,000 council employees only recently fought very hard to establish – and accepted a payout on the basis that – they are doing equal and equivalent work to the refuse collection staff? Are all of them engaged in such vital and time-sensitive work that the council could not justify issuing them gloves and a high-viz and drafting them into a reserve army of refuse collectors?
It would at the very least be illuminating to see how many of them refused to do it, despite their previous vehement insistence that it was equivalent work. Not that the contradiction would necessarily occur to them: one of the actual litigants in the similar ruling against Next conceded that ‘a warehouse job did not seem particularly attractive but if it had been a lot more money she would have considered it’; she still demanded, and got, ‘equal’ pay regardless.
Such an effort might also put the spotlight back on central government, where an increasing share of the blame for local governments’ woes ultimately rests, not just for absurd equal-pay legislation but also the increasingly impossible burden of unfunded statutory responsibilities such as social care. If Birmingham councillors are going to be pinned in the spotlight by stupid Whitehall decisions, the least they can do is make ministers squirm.
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