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Suhail Sadiq’s car repair business is thriving and he’s furious about it.
The rats are responsible. “The amount of cars we’ve got coming in now with wiring chewed up by rats is unbelievable,” he says. Staff at Heartlands Auto Centre in Birmingham have repaired about 15 cars with chewed battery cables in the past week. The rats are drawn to the warmer cars at night, he says – rats gnaw to keep their teeth a manageable length.
Sadiq would be much happier to go without the extra business if the inner city streets of Small Heath and Alum Rock were not strewn with bin bags and overflowing wheelie bins – because Birmingham city council’s refuse collectors have been on strike for nearly four weeks. “Why should we be dragging our bins across Birmingham?” Sadiq says. “The whole council from top to bottom should be fired. We’re not in a third world country. We’re in England.”
His views, and those of many Brummies who blame the council, seem to have spooked Labour in the buildup to England’s local election campaign, and sparked a row between Keir Starmer and trade union Unite.
Downing Street said the union should “focus on negotiating in good faith” and “drop their opposition”, prompting Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, to hit back saying it was “not surprising that many workers in Britain question the Labour government’s commitment to working people” for blaming bin workers for the dispute.
How did it come to this? Superficially, the strike is about the council’s plan to scrap the role of waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO). It wants to save money. Unite wants to save jobs.
But that’s as simplistic as saying the first world war was caused by the killing of an archduke. This is the second Birmingham bin strike, and its roots lie in the first Birmingham bin strike of 2017, as well as a landmark ruling over equal pay still sending shockwaves through British industry, and a decade of underfunded local government.
Back in 2017, the refuse collectors went on strike, also over plans to cut jobs, and bin bags built up for seven weeks. It ended with a classic fudge – some working conditions would change, and the council would create the role of WRCO.
Each waste lorry in Birmingham has a driver and three workers at the back who collect bins and empty them into the cart.
Two are loaders, grade-two jobs, and one is a WRCO, a grade-three job, paid up to £8,000 more, for extra responsibilities such as collecting data on a tablet, nicknamed the “slab in the cab”.
The problem, as lawyers successfully argued at an employment tribunal, was that these extra responsibilities didn’t really exist. The tablet disappeared within a week. This was simply “job enrichment” – a way for the council to pay some of the men more, to resolve the strike under cover of bureaucracy.
Those lawyers were Leigh Day, acting on behalf of women working in council roles that didn’t get those kinds of perks – traditionally female-dominated functions such as teaching assistants, cleaners and caterers.
The WRCO job was used as a comparable by Leigh Day to demonstrate that the council discriminated against women in favour of men. Even worse, Birmingham had created the WRCO role five years after it had lost a landmark equal pay claim in 2012, when it had given bonuses to refuse collectors and street cleaners but not to cleaners and caterers. By 2023, it had paid out £1.1bn in a series of compensation claims, and that year effectively went bankrupt. Other similar claims have been lodged against Next, Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and the Co-op.
Last December, Birmingham settled this new claim, brought by GMB and Unison, and agreed in principle to pay a £250m settlement to 6,000 women. The final details are still being worked out and the council is trying to prevent further claims by changing its employment practices – hence the scrapping of the WRCO which led to this year’s strike.
“This is an issue that’s dogged this council for years,” said John Cotton, Birmingham’s leader since 2023. Successive administrations had failed to “eliminate the injustice” he said, “and clearly, if we don’t follow the right processes and procedures relating to pay grading, then we risk opening up a future liability.”
Fixing the problems could mean levelling up pay for the teaching assistants, the cleaners and the caterers, but given Birmingham’s financial problems, adding millions to the payroll is not an option for Cotton.
The Labour leader insisted the council was not levelling down. It had made a “very fair and reasonable” offer to the refuse workers “which means nobody needs to lose any pay”. He said “everyone who’s affected” had been offered alternative roles, either as street cleaners on the same grade, or an option to become a driver on a higher grade. Others could take voluntary redundancy or have their pay protected for six months.
But Unite’s national lead officer, Onay Kasab, said in fact some workers would lose up to £8,000 in pay cuts. “Not everyone can retrain as a driver,” he said; reversing out of a narrow cul-de-sac is not an easy task.
“We know there aren’t enough vacancies so people will train, then go down to a grade two until a vacancy comes up.”
And Kasab was sceptical that any loader taking on a street cleaner’s job would stay on the same pay. “If you’re reducing a loader’s pay, it’s not going to be long before you reduce a street cleaner’s pay too. So it’s a disingenuous offer.”
Morale seemed solid on the picket line at the Atlas depot in Tyseley on Thursday, where the strikers had been disrupting the council’s attempts to use agency workers to clear the rubbish mountain by walking slowly in front of each bin lorry as it left the depot, delaying their rounds by two hours or more. The next day, police were asked to step in and the lorries were able to move freely.
For workers such as Wayne Bishop, a 58-year-old who has worked in all weathers for the past 15 years, collecting potentially dangerous waste including needles and medical equipment, gas bottles and electrical goods, it seems wrong to ask them to pay for the council’s previous mistakes.
“If we’re demoted and we lose £600 a month it’s taking a big section out of our money,” he says. “They just put it on us. The council has left us with no other option. All we want is fair pay for a fair day’s work.”
