Birmingham Bin Workers Encouraged to Retrain for Jobs That Don’t Exist

Birmingham council encouraged bin workers who were at risk of redundancy to retrain and apply for new jobs. Then it got rid of the jobs.

In the latest development in an increasingly bitter, months-long dispute, bin workers told Novara Media that the council lied to them.

Months of strike action from hundreds of workers has seen tonnes of uncollected waste accumulating on the city’s streets after the council announced plans to scrap the waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO) role in August last year. The strikes have become so acrimonious that Unite the Union suspended deputy prime minister Angela Rayner’s membership.

Announcing the proposals last November, the council’s assistant waste director Robert Edmonson wrote to refuse collectors offering a bleak outlook: the Labour-run city council would cut the grade-three WRCO role, meaning an £8,000 pay-cut for some workers.  

A small silver lining, however, was that some workers could take the opportunity to move into a higher pay grade by becoming refuse lorry drivers, with the council supporting those keen to pursue this option with retraining and help obtaining licences. Edmonson said: “Significant progress is being made to ensure that everyone can choose the option most suitable to them.”

More than 20 workers opted to retrain as drivers, while another 20 are still in training, with the expectation that they’d be earning thousands of pounds more every year.

But since qualifying, workers have been told by the council that there are no driver roles available. Without driver jobs, that means they’ll now be downgraded into grade-two roles, which pay barely above minimum wage.

Not only are there no driver jobs available, but the council has downgraded the role and its pay.

When the council initially encouraged workers to retrain as drivers, the role was classed as a grade-four, meaning pay between £33,666 to £40,476.

But on 9 July, talks between the council and the union mediated by government conciliation service Acas collapsed, and the council announced it would push ahead and impose its restructuring plan. 

On 16 July, it announced it would downgrade the driver role to a grade-three, meaning that drivers could earn as little as £26,000.

Danny Taylor has worked as a refuse collector for 25 years, and is among those who opted to upscale his skills and train as a driver. “I couldn’t afford to take the £8,000 loss,” he said. “I was one of the first to go onto the training, and I passed my HGV training the first time round.”

But shortly after he’d qualified, Taylor learned that the council had made the role a grade-three. “They told me I was going to be a grade-four. That was a lie. They broke their part of the deal.”

“I’m lost for words. We’re living in the cost of living crisis and they’re just decimating the working class people.”

To justify the move down to grade-three, the council has said it will remove certain responsibilities from the driver and reallocate them to the area service manager, who is based in the depot.

But Taylor is sceptical: “That’s not going to be the case. They’re going to expect us to still do the same role for less. How can we believe a word that the council’s saying when they haven’t honoured their consultation process?”

As part of the reallocation of duties, the council says that the area service manager will now use a computer to remotely direct refuse collection.

“They’re saying, well, the computer will tell you where to go,” said Taylor. “But as drivers we know the best routes to go, we know which areas are busy during the day, or if we can’t go around that school. We don’t need that computer. They’re basically taking the leader part of the job out so we can’t make decisions any more.”

Unite is arguing that anyone who passes driver training should be treated as a driver for pay purposes, even if no driver role exists.

The extraordinary reversal comes after months of bitter disagreement over who Unite is actually in dispute with. While technically in dispute with Birmingham city city, in 2023 then local government secretary Michael Gove appointed a team of commissioners to conduct the running of the council after it effectively declared itself bankrupt.

Unite says that the commissioners, who do not take part in the negotiations, are the ultimate decision makers, and accused them in May of blocking a deal. Sharon Graham, Unite general secretary, said that in “35 years of negotiating huge disputes”, she had “never seen such a shambles”. 

As Rayner is now local government secretary, the union argues that her decision to keep the commissioners in place has brought the central government into decision-making of the dispute.

Birmingham council did not respond to a request for comment.

Taylor said: “The soul of the job’s gone. The heart of the job’s gone. It makes me angry to see how they’ve come in and just destroyed what was once a great job. They’ve made it horrible. They just want cheap labour with a high turnover of staff, because that’s exactly what it’s gonna be.”