Bins dispute ramped up amid talks deadlock
THE piles of bags and uncollected wheelie bins are set to continue lining Birmingham’s streets as the dispute between council bosses and the trade union Unite remains unresolved.
From Friday binmen are set to strike for two hours each day as the prepare to ramp up their industrial action.
There is already an overtime ban and a work-to-rule which includes staff returning to depots for tea breaks.
Bosses and the unions have held 57 hours of meetings since January in a bid to resolve the dispute, but both sides seem entrenched.
The dispute revolves around a major overhaul in the refuse collection service which will see a layer of 113 supervisor jobs, called leading hands, removed and replaced with lower grade workers.
It also led to heated exchanges in the Council Chamber this week as the Labour leadership found themselves bombarded with questions, complaints and accusations of incompetence as issues of bin bags piled high in tower blocks, vermin in streets and hundreds of missed collections were raised by councillors.
The black bags piling up outside tower blocks and rubbish packing out bin stores could result in another Grenfell Tower inferno, councillor Deirdre Alden, the Conservative shadow cabinet member for bins, told the meeting.
She highlighted the case of the Benmore estate in her Edgbaston ward where the Optima Housing Association was getting frustrated at the lack of collections for its tenants.
Labour cabinet member Lisa Trickett responded that tower block safety was paramount, particularly after Grenfell, and that management and staff had been instructed to clear the rubbish as a priority. But Councillor Alden later reported that bin staff who turned up had refused to clear the bags, telling her that fire safety was not their problem.
She said: “After what happened at Grenfell, I am appalled that any bin crew could drive away and leave this rubbish piled outside blocks of flats where children are living. How could they do that?”
The union Unite said they granted an exception from industrial action for tower blocks. However, officials were told a private contractor was being brought in to clear up the mess, but this had not happened.
The council was due to send street cleaning teams, instead.
Both Councillor Trickett and council leader John Clancy apologised to citizens for the dispute.
But Councillor Clancy defended the council’s reforms of the bins service, saying: “We overspent last year and we need to reduce our reliance on agency staff and overtime, which were responsible for that overspend.
“These are difficult decisions we are having to make. I would ideally like to invest, but we have to cut our cloth and make decisions about how we run the service.”
He stressed there would be no job losses and that many agency staff would get full-time jobs with the council as a result of reorganisation.
The council says it wants to overhaul the service to make it more efficient and reduce reliance on overtime and agency staff after overspending by £8.4 million last year. They say that other jobs at the same grade are available to the leading hands so no one needs to lose their job or pay.
But unions say the council is cutting supervisor jobs and changing working patterns, from four days of nine hours, to five seven-and-a-half hour days a week, which will have an impact on safety and productivity.
Figures released at the council meeting have revealed that complaints of missed collections were already rising sharply in the 12 days running up to the start of industrial action on June 30.
A steady rate of less than 1,000 complaints a week shot up to 4,429 during the week of June 18-24, and then leaped to 6,916 the following week, during which there was a halfday strike.
After what happened at Grenfell, I am appalled that any bin crew could drive away and leave this rubbish piled outside blocks of flats where children are living Cllr Deirdre Alden