This week, though, the Labour leader of the city council, John Cotton, announced that a settlement with Unite was, miraculously, “within sight”. Cotton said the settlement could not be approved by the council before the local election next week, but pledged to get it over the line “as a matter of absolute priority” if Labour are voted back in. “Only Labour”, he warned, “can end this dispute.”
The crisis with the bins began two years later, when Unite launched its strike, triggered by the council’s decision to scrap the Waste Recycling and Collection Office (WRCO) role. Workers argue that the change downgraded their jobs and pay. The council says the WRCO role is redundant.
No, the lawyers have said that that’s just a transparent attempt to get around the Equality Act – wimmins must be paid equally for work of equal value, the judges have defined this as school dinners ladies, classroom assistants and binmen – so they can’t do that any more. The council doesn’t have enough cash to pay the dinner ladies and assistants £8k a year more each.
There is no solution without abolishing the Equality Act.
Is the equality act the issue or an interpretation of it? Is not the whole equal value thing subjective?
“There is no solution without abolishing the Equality Act.”
The act is not the problem, it’s the judgement of how “work of equal value” has been assessed.
An assessment uses:
All that is required is a simple adjustment of how much that physical effort is valued. Give the dinner ladies a go and see how they assess walking/jogging 5-12 miles each day and maneuvering heavy bins.
The Supreme Court has apparently adjudicated that the dinner ladies / cleaners / bin men are of equal value, so abolition seems to be the only option…..
A judge that had brains would take a sample of binmen and dinner ladies (self-picked even) and require them to trade jobs for a month or six. Even train them first.
Though the union reps would have to be part of the sample.
Only then would they be allowed back into the case.
M, how about the Judge do the respective jobs for a month or six then adjudicate on whether the roles are ‘of equal value’…..
Note to self – read all the replies before commenting – Matt beat me to it…….
“Though the union reps would have to be part of the sample.”
I would be pretty sure that the union reps for the binmen and the dinner ladies are of equal value and equally incompetent at doing either job
The problem is having the State as employer of binmen as well as dinner ladies. If both roles were privatised and run by separate private employers, the case would never have arisen in the first place.
(Happy to be corrected, if the scope of the Equality Act is wider than I assumed possible in a free country.)
Apparently, Brum has been hiring in Coventry’s bin providers as private contractors to fill in, and they seem to be doing a better job according to the trading reports given to Coventry councillors. Brum councillors know nothing about this as they are the customer.
Disagree. This is exactly why we have prices, isn’t it? Because there are things that are hard to compare in detail, and/or largely subjective, hence discovered iteratively rather than calculated?
As has been pointed out on here repeatedly, not much of a candidate pool overlap between binmen and dinner ladies.
They could tell the dinner ladies that they’re going to be “on the bins” on Mondays and Fridays.
The Supreme Court should try a couple of days on the bins and then say it’s equal to cleaning a classroom.
The UK is blighted by its own legal profession. What was that Shakespeare quote about killing all the lawyers? Despite the objection expressed, it’s probably time.
Most of the many things wrong with our society can be traced back to involvement of the legal profession. The fact that they earn vast sums of money for the damage they inflict makes it all the more unpalatable.
What we need is to stop the legal profession being financially lucrative. Perhaps it should be assessed as being valued equally with the bin men and dinner ladies and paid the same hourly rate.
all those vast sums are good for the GDP figures though!
Indeed. Lawyers use the cost of lawyers to achieve their aims. Matter I’ve been involved with the past year. Someone was entitled to something, but in the absence of sufficient funds or entitlement to legal aid, was denied it. And it’s been obvious what the tactics were. Make it impossible for the plaintiff to go to law because they couldn’t afford to. Everything’s been spun out for maximum cost.
What the lawyer didn’t plan for was me backing the plaintiff & covering their legal costs. We’re 25k in but we’re going to win this. And costs & I reckon 50k in damages for the 5 years of legal prevarication.
Of course all this will be borne by the defendant. Lawyer still makes their money. If I was the defendant I’d be suing my lawyer for misleading advice. They never had a chance of winning, if it went full process.
Be wary of expenses in court, the loser being asked to pay 70% is good going in England and Wales. I think the idea is to discourage the hoi polloi from going in the first place.
I dunno. Depends on where you are, but for the last thirty years here wheelie bins have been picked up by a truck with a hydraulic arm, with a fair amount of automation to it. The driver might have get out to reposition one or something occasionally, but generally it’s just get the truck in the right spot and press a button.
It’s unsociable hours and you do of course have to be pretty good with the truck, so I still wouldn’t call it equal work to an office job, but it’s not heavy or dangerous.
Yeah. Instead of the blokes coming into the yard and picking up the bin, this lazy householder bitches as he wheels them out on to the footpath.
Of course when I was a kid, as we didn’t have sewerage, the dunnyman came in and picked up the can of excrement and hauled it out to the truck. I’m sure I’d be bitching even more if I had to do that!!
Boganboy, I’m glad missed the dunny emptying era, I’m a bit younger than you.
I’m not a huge fan of wheeling the bins out either, I’m just as lazy as you, but still it’s a hell of a lot better than loading 5 galvanised steel bins into the back of the ute and driving them down to the pick-up point at the end of a kilometre long drive. Which is what I spent most of my teens doing as the eldest child in a family of six.
For the UK commenters, generally in Oz you haul your own garbage to the curb and position it just so, if you’re lucky it gets picked up. It’s one guy sitting on his arse in a truck, at least where I live.
I may be a little bitter about this at the moment because our red bin (we have four, red is general waste) recently got damaged. The handle and one side is bent and cracked. I got straight on to the council, they said put it out at the next fortnightly collection for repair, I sent them some close up photos showing it wasn’t repairable, they said if it’s usable the contractor will check it out. Sure enough, it didn’t get replaced this morning, so that’s another two weeks with a fly breeding ground because the lid won’t close. The annoying part is that it was in a line of 13 bins from our estate and none of the others were damaged. And it was standing up when the missus collected it. So, they obviously dropped it then put it back on the kerb. And drove off.
I’m not inclined to feel very sympathetic to bin men right now.
In the UK domestic bin lorries usually have a crew of 3 or 4, driver plus operatives who bring the wheely bins to the truck, which are then tipped mechanically into the back. So less physical than 40 years ago when all the bins and bags would have been manually thrown in, but still not sat on your arse in a comfy office chair. On your feet for a lot of the shift ( with some sitting in the crew cab between stops). I doubt there are many fat bin men (bin lorry drivers almost certainly though). Plus add in the fact you are working outside in all winds and weathers, and in the UK at least in and around traffic for much of your shift, I’d say working on the bins is definitely not for the faint hearted. A cushy number it isn’t.
It certainly was more physical back in the days when the bin men collected the bin from the back garden, emptied it into the lorry then returned it to where it was. But we generated a lot less rubbish in those days but the lack of wheels cancels that out. The big difference is the crews were much bigger dividing up the work. I well recall a crew of a dozen (wearing bowler hats) riding on the running boards of a bin lorry and taking turns resting. Now it’s three on the ground jogging to keep up.
When I were a lad they were called “dustcarts” for a reason: more than half of the contents of the galvanised dustbin (remember them?) was coal fire ash. Dustman came and picked it up buy its handles and tipped it into the back of the dustcart. Dust everywhere. Dustmen wore leather jerkins over their donkey jackets.
I suspect the routes change as the work does. I see them sending one or two guys out ahead of the lorry, lining up bins and collecting small stuff into their own wheely, optimising the effort. Street cleared faster, but probably more streets on each shift.
Where my sister lives the binmen actually sort stuff into different compartments on the lorry, although the householder has to do some pre-sorting into different bins first.
Worth pointing out, not all of the earnings of binmen are wages. There’s also the bunce. When I was working in London I had the phone numbers of crew leaders in various boroughs. Phone call, put a load of rubbish out on the pavement & it would very quickly, magically vanish. Saved a helluvalot on skips.. One of those binmen bought himself a veritable mansion up in Hertfordshire on the strength of bunce. They can double their earnings.
Sounds like the binmen are overpaid if a dinner lady could do the job for £8k a year less.
I’m not sure why brum council arent just dropping a skip at the end of each road every couple of weeks in the interim?
If i understand things properly, it’s a specific ‘safety’ or some-such role which Birmingham are trying to get rid of. No other city or county council has such a role. Unsurprisingly, the role was created as a sop to the unions in an earlier dispute. The role has extra ‘responsibility’ so of course demands a higher salary. One day Joe Blogs was a bin man, the next day, doing the same job, he was a WRCO earning up to £8k more
WRCO, probably the jobsworth who decides what not to collect because its not in the right coloured bin bag or whatever.
Yep. That role created so as to be able to pay the binmen more than the dinner ladies.
It’s sort of amazing that we accept that the unions can simultaneously have their own political party and wield power separately via strikes.
They should of course be allowed to both have parties and strike but their employers should also be allowed to fire them immediately if/when they do strike. We want less restrictions, not more!
In a related story I was listening to Katie Lam this morning talking about the Next case where a woman won a case to say that shop floor work and warehouse work were of the same value.
I missed it at the time but apparently Next offered warehouse training and encourage staff shop floor staff to take up warehouse jobs. The woman in question turned down the offer saying the pay wasn’t high enough to get her to work in the warehouse.
The imbeciles are running the asylum, we’re fvcked, well and truly fvcked.