At a grocery store in Birmingham’s Balsall Heath neighbourhood, putrid juice from rotten vegetables pools at the back of the shop, the result of nearly a month of uncollected waste.
Waste workers have been on strike in the city on and off since January but are now entering their second week of indefinite action, as rubbish and complaints from local businesses and residents pile up.
“ Everything is leaking,” says Mohammed Nadeem, an employee at SMS Grocers whose task is to oversee the makeshift dump. Outside, a butcher’s green bin has started to smell, while nearby a cairn of black bags sits atop a public waste container.
While the dispute over waste management in the UK’s second city is a testament to the council’s beleaguered finances, the budgetary pressures on councils have led to steep cutbacks in public service across England.
Birmingham City — the largest local authority in Europe — declared itself in effect bankrupt in late 2023. But local authorities across the country are also struggling to make ends meet.
The union Unite called the industrial action following a move by Birmingham council to downgrade and reduce the pay for some bin workers. The union said the workers had not been properly consulted on changes to the city’s refuse collection service.
The two sides are scheduled to come to the table this week after a terse break in negotiations.
Birmingham’s financial pressures stem partly from a historic equal pay settlement for about £250mn triggered by a previous Unite bin workers strike in 2017. The city council has also had to contend with a disastrous software contract, which cost £100mn more than expected and led to inaccurate council tax, business rates and staff salary figures.
Unite says its workers have had to bear the brunt of the council’s failures. “It always seems to be the bin workers that are targeted,” said Zoe Mayou, a regional representative for the union.
The council says the role of grade three waste collector, which was also an issue during the 2017 dispute, does not fit its plan for modernisation. The role is paid more than lorry loaders but less than drivers, and requires completing some safety and data collection tasks as well as collecting rubbish.
Craig Cooper, director of city operations at Birmingham city council, insisted the dispute was not about the bankruptcy but instead introducing larger changes to help deliver a reliable public service.
“ We’re upgrading an ageing vehicle fleet. We’re improving the technology on the fleet. We’re adapting our ability to improve a collection of recyclables,” Cooper said.
However, he admitted the dispute could open up further liability for the council’s equal pay settlement.
“Every decision the council makes must be with a view to not incurring future equal pay claims,” he said.
The equal pay settlement arose out of the 2017 bin strike, which saw favourable terms given to predominantly male bin workers. Unison and GMB said that female council workers in comparable roles, represented by their unions, did not see equivalent gains.
Birmingham has some of the most economically deprived areas in the country and has been grappling with a cut in services and an unprecedented 21 per cent increase in council tax.
Last month, the government granted 30 councils large financial bailouts as part of efforts to stem the crisis.
Local authorities including Croydon, Nottingham, Slough, Thurrock and Woking have issued a section 114 notice in recent years, meaning a council cannot commit to new spending commitments, which has led to service cutbacks.
Birmingham council has responded to the strike by rolling out waste collection trucks where residents can load their own rubbish. Cooper said that businesses should consider private collection services. “Each and every commercial entity has a responsibility to clear their waste,” he said.
Local businesses, meanwhile, are growing impatient with the city government.
“Businesses are concerned about the region’s reputation. We’re coming off a successful Commonwealth Games and the longer this goes on the more it isn’t a good look,” said Beverley Nielsen, a research associate at the Centre for the New Midlands think-tank.
A Birmingham City conservative councillor used a recent council meeting to point out that the rate of missed collection targets had been increasing under the Labour-led council well before the strike was called.
Conservative shadow frontbencher Robert Jenrick also visited the city earlier this month to highlight the accumulation of street waste.
Unite has also thrown national resources behind the industrial action, suggesting the strike could put Labour’s overhaul of workers’ rights to the test. “If people are not being paid a fair rate for a fair day’s work, that undermines everything in the Employment Rights Act,” said Mayou.
For now, city residents are finding it difficult to deal with the cuts to waste collection service. Lydia Omemgboji, an administrator at Cherry Lodge Care Home in the Druids Heath estate says rubbish collection has been intermittent since the strike began. She believes that the uncollected waste may have been the cause of a recent norovirus outbreak at the facility.
“It really demoralised us.” Omemgboji explained. “It’s making the environment unhealthy.”
