She said: “The council continually denied it but the figures here, that the Guardian have exposed, show the truth. The facts are clear. The council needs to stop wasting Birmingham residents’ money trying to break the strike and instead resolve the strike.”
The Equality Act says that binmen must be paid the same as workers of equal value – teaching assistants and school dinner ladies. Pay sufficient to get binmen to turn up must be offered to all those many, many others when they’re already happily enough turning up for work.
Brum is not allowed to vary pay so that they get enough binmen without paying all those many, many, others more.
Rewscind the Equality Act at the strike would be over 30 minutes later.
The Cons were in power for 14 years and did f*ck-all to remedy the problems created by Blair and co. Who do we vote for to get out of this mess?
You’ve aptly named the Party that gained power. I remember despairing when “Call me Dave” became leader who I thought would probably be worse than John Minor. When he said he was the “heir to Blair”, the country’s fate was sealed. If only MTK had said he was the “heir to Jezza” we might have avoided the worst…
100%. I nurture a special hatred for Cameron. He had a real chance to right some wrongs but was so stupid and pathetic and shortsighted he chose not too.
Cameron was a globalist progressive. He was working as intended. This is the only reasonable conclusion to make.
Cameron never seemed interested in power or policy, merely in holding office.
He looked and acted like one of the more inconsequential of the 18th century Whigs; a Spencer Compton perhaps.
Prior to Cameron taking over, the Conservatives had not only suffered three consecutive and traumatic general election losses (1997, 2001, 2005), but also they had failed to move the Overton Window rightwards. The electorate was wearying of Labour, but still preferred soggy centrism to radical rightism. The result was Cameron…
The explanation always sounds like an excuse. The media and the chattering classes are centre left and see anything that is not centre left as morally wicked. The Tories have historically attracted plenty of people who want a quiet life and who want to let sleeping dogs lie. They don’t want to be shouted at by people who live in nice homes in North London. They’ll only do anything when things fall apart completely.
If we want to get out of this mess then we’d need to elect people who don’t care about noddy hacks, actors and other idiots screaming at them. We’d need to defund the BBC and the charity-industrial complex. And we’d need the electorate to grow up a bit.
We won’t do any of that. We’ll just muddle through, and solve one or two of our problems when they get too bad to ignore, at great expense
Reform is our only hope…
In no sane world is the dirty, manual labour of a refuse collector equal to a teaching assistant or dinner lady.
A Tribunal decided that it was. Report for re-education comrade!
I await the decision that Premier League footballers and those in the lower divisions (and the women) should be paid the same money… They’re all doing exactly the same job, i.e. playing football for money, which is a far greater similarity than that between bin-men and dinner-ladies.
Dear Baron, you’re a bit late.
There used to be maximum wage for professional footballers – their trade union won a long argument to permit unequal wages.
Unequal wages is not unreasonable.
The wage cap just meant the money spent on Premier League games went to the owners instead. When the reason you’re going to the game is the play, i.e. the players.
I suspect some of that money went to perks for the Premier League players. Rather like the company car used to be ubiquitous since it wasn’t taxed at the same rate as a rise in wages.
Indeed. No one worries about a dinner ladies strike…
It’s not so much the “Equality Act” as assessing the bin workers and the female dominated roles as “equal demand” that is the mistake. It puts ideological considerations of equality above the real market reality.
As such it is a great example of how Murphy’s ideology will fail in a way that neoliberal economics could so easily solve.
It’s also a great example of how the legal profession getting their noses into the “Equality Act” trough can be hugely costly and detrimental to the rest of society.
Don’t agree. Sure, the judgement is bullshit, but the core problem is that the courts should not be trying to compare jobs at all. They’re not equipped to do it, it’s very easy to put your thumb on the scales, and most people here would argue strongly that the question doesn’t HAVE an answer. That it’s an outcome of allowing markets, voluntary contracts, to churn through messy human preferences and the complex costs of doing anything.
So, the problem is putting the courts in the position where they think this is something they can judge. That’s a legislative error. The claim was brought under the Equality Act, which does reference the concept of jobs of equal value. It might not be root cause, but it’s certainly the proximal one.
“It’s also a great example of how the legal profession can be hugely costly and detrimental to the rest of society.”
Fixed it for you.
Never did understand why the fungible dinner ladies and teaching assistants weren’t put on the bins. If they wouldn’t do it for the money the original claim is de facto disproven.
Plus the offended screaming and wailing for even *suggesting* it would be hilarious…
Obvious.
“Your cushy inside job is deemed of equal value to outside dirty work (with heavy lifting). So you do that every other week, and the binmen get to sit in your office chair alternate weeks.
Or you sign here, agreeing your work is of lesser value. Choose now.”
“But I have to deal with feral children all day!”
“Mmm, you have a point there.”
I suspect having some gruff binmen doling out the dinners every other week might actually have some positive impact on the boys.
If you have to deal with feral children, that means that the higher-rated Teaching Class are not doing their job… Go complain to *them* …..
Have you noted that the negotiation is with the union which is led by one Sharon Graham? Equal pay for unequal work.
I have few resentments against my schooling but three were caused by the idiocy of national pay scales and the even greater idiocy of national pay scales that didn’t distinguish the teachers of different subjects.
Thus we didn’t have a Physics teacher: we were taught physics by a chemist who really didn’t know much Physics at all. (He eventually asked me for help which says a lot about his character, bless him.)
Secondly, we didn’t get a metalworking class we were promised because the teacher jacked it in and went to work at the new atomic power station nearby. (We called them “atomic” not “nuclear” in those days.)
Thirdly I got only two-thirds of the maths classes I’d been promised in my final year because the school was short of maths teachers.
It’s always struck me that many people claim to find the idea obscene that a wage is a price. Stupid fuckers!
A wage is indeed a price. It’s the price for which you agree to pay attention to this instead of that.
The worst teacher I encountered was the careers teacher in sixth form. I was completely unprepared for his incompetence by the excellence of the other terachers I’d had in the preceeding six years, so didn’t realise how much he’d knackered up my life until years later.
One of the best teachers was my maths teacher. End of school was rapidly approaching, I wanted to keep the access to loads of computers I’d had for half a decade, I perceived that teaching in a school would get me that access to computers, I talked to him about going into teaching. He told me: you’re good with computers, don’t go into teaching, do something with computers. My mistake was below-level-of-even-thinking that the careers teacher had similar level of knowledge and competence, and his advice was similarly competent. If you’d actually asked me, my inarticulated thoughts would have been “but he’s the careers teacher, he’s the TEACHER, of *COURSE* he knows more about the world than I do, of *COURSE* he knows what decisions I should be making.”
There’s an anti-resentment I have about my schooling: there was no careers teacher, hurray!
P.S. And the maths teaching we got was terrific – the problem was that there was simply a shortage of maths teachers.
I seem to remember a film about women at Ford in Dagenham who were stitching seat covers going on strike for the same pay as men on the production line. Now I think about it, how many women stitch seat covers in Dagenham Ford today? Or men on the production line, for that matter – it brought the whole shebang down. Then there was the strikeof coal miners. How many members of the NUM work in mines today? And women on strike at a film processing lab. Was it Grunwick? I forget. How many people work in film processing now?
Ah the miners. In the list of number of mines closed, Mrs T features between Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson.
Maggie’s misfortune there was Arthur Scargill. He wasn’t interested in the miners per se. He just wanted them to be the Forlorn Hope in his quest for a Socialist/Communist coup.
As I regularly point out, the Mini plant at Cowley contributes more added value than did the whole of BL in the days of red Robbo, with only ~10% of the workforce. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I bet similar is true of Ford back in the day.
Yeah, but it doesn’t stop Oxford council hating cars.
And the English:
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/04/03/flag-raising-activist-arrested-for-causing-alarm-and-distress/
How big a tactical nuke would be required to flatten Oxford without doing too much damage outside the ring road? Or better still a tactical neutron bomb. Kill all the Lefty inhabitants, start again with useful people.
If you have access to a neutron bomb that kills only Greens and their supporters, I think it could be deployed more widely.