The City of Birmingham has been transformed into a rubbish dump in recent weeks, with thousands of tonnes of rubbish piling up in several locations due to an ongoing 'all out' strike by the city's refuse workers.
It was especially bad in the recent period of hot weather last week apparently, with rats grown fat on a free-for-all banquet of refuse "the size of cats" roaming the city, becoming "more brazen and aggressive" by the day.
This event has been dubbed "binmageddon" with increasingly desperate Brummies fly-tipping and when the back-up refuse collections take place, they are overwhelmed!
The strike is about the proposal to cut the waste recycling and collection officer (WCRO) job, and downgrade them to a role in which bin lorry drivers are paid £8 000 a year less, going down from around £40K to a mere £32K.
To my mind £40K sounds like a lot to be paying a bin lorry driver, and I've heard that the salary came out of the last industrial action in 2017 when these jobs were created in a deal to end that strike.
This in turn led to thousands of women demanding pay-rises for their similar job roles, given that pretty much all of new WCROS were men.
So this is just one all round massive cock-up.
So maybe a pay-cut is the solution....?
I mean I'm not one for a race to the bottom, but there are plenty of people who would be happy to do this job and I'm not sure they need to be earning more than I am atm, and more than a starting-wage for a teacher, so I wouldn't be particularly sad to see these wages coming down.
But £8K is a lot to lose on an annual wage!
I'd rather just see a national rebalancing.... more funding for local authorities and better wages for everyone, frankly!
