When Rishi Sunak U-turned on the government’s net zero policies last week, among the nonexistent proposals “scrapped” was the imposition of seven different recycling bins on households. Yet, roughly five miles east of the Downing Street press conference, it didn’t matter how many bins you had – strike action by Tower Hamlets refuse workers meant that none were being collected. After mountains of rubbish grew taller than the borough’s residents, Unite reached a deal this week securing a one-off £750 payment and the in-housing of agency workers on full council terms and conditions.
Workers in this London borough may have reached an agreement, but other picket lines are cropping up at bin depots across the country. For those employed directly by councils, the latest round of strikes is in response to the local authority employers’ offered pay increase of £1,925 for the year. Unite currently has a mandate for industrial action at 14 local authorities that employ refuse workers, including Darlington, Ipswich and Warrington. In Wales, strikes are ongoing at Cardiff and Wrexham councils, with scores more workers waiting in the wings. The GMB is balloting council workers in England and Wales on strike action, with the vote closing on 24 October.
In addition to council employees, outsourced refuse workers have been in individual disputes with private contractors. This summer, bin collections at more than 125,000 homes in Sandwell, West Midlands, were disrupted when workers employed by Serco took strike action. The outsourcing giant narrowly avoided disputes in Charnwood, Derbyshire and Norfolk. Workers in Solihull struck against Veolia, with a handful of planned strikes against the company called off, including one earlier this week in Sheffield. A five-day strike across Veolia’s waste and recycling plants in Nottinghamshire is set to end on Sunday.
What’s behind the explosion in waste workers walking off the job? While images of uncollected rubbish have prompted comparisons to the winter of discontent, the stoppages we’re seeing now are a different industrial phenomenon. Although workers’ frustrations in 1978-79, directed at governmental pay restraint, falling real-terms wages and the impact of high inflation on living standards are familiar, Clare Keogh, Unite national officer for local authorities, explained that “we’re in a very different place now”.
“Historically, refuse collection was a very secure and well-paid job for life. Now, we have fragmented services, or people doing the same job on different pay and entitlements, because the council has handed the contract out to so many different companies over the years. You wouldn’t have seen that in the 70s.”
Under the first wave of outsourcing, beginning in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher introduced compulsory competitive tendering, many local authorities moved away from directly providing refuse collection. Instead, they contracted the service out to companies such as Serco, Veolia and Biffa. Not required to adhere to national pay agreements that set council workers’ pay, outsourcing companies have driven down refuse collectors’ wages. Pay for loaders, who pick up the waste, can be as low as £19,000.
That’s not to say that poor pay is limited to outsourcing giants. Austerity left local authorities unable, or in some cases unwilling, to increase pay. In Coventry, Unite’s six months of continuous strike action was taken against a Labour council.
Unions have reported the rise of an “in-between” model, where refuse collectors are employed by a company that is wholly owned by a council, which likely recognises the harms of outsourcing, but balks at the cost of bringing those workers back in-house. Earlier this month, GMB settled a strike with Canenco, Canterbury council’s own waste collection company.
On top of reduced pay packets, refuse workers are facing an increasingly difficult workload. Cuts to neighbourhood services have meant less frequent rubbish collections, with some councils cutting down from weekly to fortnightly rounds. At the same time, the volume of waste produced by households has shot up, with mountains of plastic packaging and cardboard boxes being generated by e-commerce and takeaways. “We’ve become even more of a throwaway society in the last 20 years,” said Gary Palmer, a GMB regional organiser. “But there aren’t extra bin trucks, so workers are having to do more bins per hourly rate.”
As a result, refuse collectors are working with heavier and larger loads, sometimes having to pull two bins at a time instead of one, or run to finish their rounds. In addition, constantly overflowing bins are a breeding ground for rats, whose attacks have hospitalised some collectors. Add the pandemic, in which essential workers felt especially exposed, and a cost of living crisis to these conditions, and “everything just explodes”, Keogh said. “It’s been a perfect storm.”
If the most recent wins are anything to go by, workers should be confident about the outcome of taking industrial action. While outsourcing was introduced by Thatcher in part to neuter unions, the long tradition of organising and high trade union density in waste collection makes a big difference when it comes to asserting industrial might.
Similar levels of disruption could be repeated throughout the country, as other local authority workers – teaching assistants, social workers, caretakers – vote alongside waste collectors on strike action for autumn. “Everybody has been getting fed up with society,” said Chris Mitchell, a senior official for GMB Scotland. “But now, they’re looking to the trade union movement.”
Polly Smythe is labour movement correspondent at Novara Media
