Binmageddon...
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.
What's a fair solution...?
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!
But the bigger picture...
I'd rather just see a national rebalancing.... more funding for local authorities and better wages for everyone, frankly!
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Yeah that's my Brum for ya....it's been kickin off here for weeks...streets are FUCKED...neighborhoods filled with rubbish...lots of businesses resorting to private bin services, and these services are becoming increasingly expensiver.
Brum city center (where i work) absolutely trashed out and getting more trashed. Hobos having a blast bin (bag) diving though.
Was chatting to my guy at the local chippy yesterday, showed me his rubbish collection out back....not good man.
I work in the Bullring and the Shopping Centre's always stuffy, no good ventilation, dusty on the top floor where restaurants are (i know cuz i gotta clean this shyte). Restaurants and coffee shops share the back corridors, which connects to the loading bays where deliveries come in. I see rats and mice all the time. When i do i shout "DINNER" and they all run away lol.
I was born with a nose condition called Anosmmia so i am not affected by the foul odour assaults. I can see Brum becoming truly a shit-hole this Summer, with the drainage problems everywhere, especially in busy downtown. When i used to work for Adam's Restaurant downtown (1 Star Michelin), i was astonished to see the amount of rats, rodents, creepy crawlies and goobers/hobos hanging out in the back alleys where we shared the same FUCKING alley with KFC, Pop-Eyes, German Donner Kebab, Ask Italia, Rudy's Pizza, the other one and the other one. I don't like to say it but a lot of foreigners working zero hour contracts, mostly coming from India and Pakistan, bring their "excellent" hygene standards to their work places...I'm a foreigner myself though i was born here...but never in my life have i seen the way these FUCKAZ clog up the drains by pouring oil down there...pouring all sorts of shit down there...and remembering in Winter when all the FUCKING ground-drains were clogged with oil...the entire back alley was festering with these rodents...whilst the sewage waters are getting pumped back up the drains, and rain water not draining...good thing i wear paratrooper boots.
Brum is going down hill man, shit it was already downhill come the 2000s, but damn i am not pleased with the state of things.
Seems lorry driver and garbage man earn good there.
Yeah.
nice
https://youtube.com/shorts/vSbx-Vd7kUo?si=EF1Kh5fJn5aBlr35
FLIPPIN HECK @valued-customer
(PS - matrix/element's public server is lagging out...always a delay on relaying messages. Give it some time, maybe a couple hours and see if messages are being decrypted. See if other people's messages are being decrypted too. If not i will reverify later on)
All other messages are decrypted presently.
more funding for local authorities and better wages for everyone, frankly! I guess this is the best solution. It seems other sectors are jealous about this pay. Nevertheless, one should not underrate the job of waste management, they add a lot to the health and environment growth. Without them, you are likely to spend more in the hospital, at traffics due to waste flood. How about house flooding during days of heavy rain. This needs to be considered
I very well know what you describing, and it looks like the financial conditions world wide just keep pushing people to this extreme, it's crazy how this whole mess started in 2017, on top of all the genre fights back and forward about rights and salary, the world was better many decades ago when ppl see each other as equal without thinking about their genre, with things as they are I can't imagine how terrible it must be to own a restaurant there right now and have to pay extra for private garbage collection when business is already tough, hope things get better soon as things will never get back to "normal"
I read somewhere that this strike is continuing due to just 42 binmen being opposed to the proposal, the overwhelming majority happy with it. It’s like the London Underground drivers coining £60 grand a year. Ridiculous, I see the hospital doctors are considering action again, not happy with their 40% increase. The unions still have too much power