The mounting piles of rat-infested black rubbish bags in Birmingham, reminiscent of the chaotic squalor under another Labour government nearly half a century ago, are grim testament to the continuing power of trade unions, in this case Unite, in the public sector. This power is likely to be enhanced in the next few years as the industrial relations provisions of the Employment Relations Bill come into force. Already some unionists seem to have anticipated the Bill’s relaxation of rules on picketing by blocking bin lorries staffed by agency workers from leaving depots.
The present strike, which has left 17,000 tonnes of festering rubbish on the streets, has now been declared a ‘major incident’ by Birmingham City Council – a declaration which should enable it to bring in extra lorries and workers from outside. This may relieve some of the immediate dangers to health posed by the strike, but there is as yet little sign of an end to the dispute.
The immediate cause of the strike is the effectively bankrupt Council’s attempt to save money and increase productivity. The main feature of its plan is the elimination of the ‘waste recycling and collection officer’ (WRCO) role. The Council sees this role as unnecessary. It claims that no comparable role exists in other local authorities and is thus a classic ‘make work’ function – rather like ‘train managers’ on Merseyrail. Unite sees this differently. Just as RMT sees train managers as an essential safety feature, so the WRCO is said to protect bin workers from the dangers of their job.
This is all against the background of the more than £250 million which the Council has been required to pay out as the result of the famous Equal Pay tribunal decision which held that male council workers such as refuse operatives, street cleaners and road maintenance workers had access to bonuses which women workers in canteens and indoor cleaning jobs, whose work had been classified as similar to that of men, did not receive.
There is no shortage of commentators – politicians, journalists and the below-the-line perpetually outraged – who see Birmingham City Council as the main villains of the piece, with the tribunal judges close behind. But it’s worth thinking about the role of unions in this too.
When we joined the European Community in the early 1970s, we signed up to an interpretation of equal pay which went beyond the UK’s legislation, which at that time simply concerned the remuneration of male and female workers doing the same job. The EC argued that men and women were very often doing different jobs and required equal pay for ‘work of equal value’ – a quasi-Marxist concept which held that pay differentials between men and women could not be justified if the skills, experience and qualifications required by the jobs were similar. This led most public sector organisations, and many large private sector businesses, to conduct ‘job evaluations’, usually carried out by highly-paid experts. This led to a ladder of grades which each job could be placed in, and meant that female cleaners and male bin workers, for example, had to be paid the same.
These evaluations did not fully reflect differences in the conditions under which work was carried out (inside or outside, shifts or fixed hours), and they didn’t reflect market conditions either. In a free market, workers in jobs where there was a shortage of applicants would tend to be paid more than those where there was an abundant supply. Suppressing this tendency creates imbalances and shortages in the labour force.
Consequently strong male-dominated public sector unions, such as those in Birmingham, were able to exploit these imbalances and use their muscle to force employers to offer bonuses of various kinds – for regular attendance, for agreeing to accept new technology, for spurious ‘productivity’ agreements etc. Faced with continual threats of strike action, it is hardly surprising that the Council acquiesced. Women, less strongly organised until recently, were unable to achieve comparable payments.
Hence the expensive equal pay judgment. As in the very similar recent cases of retail workers and warehouse workers at ASDA and Next, the tribunal judges had little option but to agree with the economic nonsense that the law mandates.
And Birmingham City Council, I think rightly, considers that the continuing existence of the WRCO supervisory role (for which there appears to be no equivalent in female majority jobs), which earlier administrations were forced to accept by union pressure, is a potential time bomb for a future equal pay case.
So the Council really needs to win this, to protect council taxpayers from future costly tribunal action – and more generally, to provide a rare example of a successful step in the battle to improve the abysmal productivity record of the public sector. Unfortunately I fear that the power of a resurgent Unite, and the government’s sentimental attachment to the trade union movement, will prevent this. And there isn’t a chance in a million that we will see changes in the equal pay legislation that exacerbates the problem. I expect to see yet another expensive fudge.
