Update on refuse strike – Wednesday 5^th January

As you are most likely aware, the city’s refuse collections, both domestic and commercial, have been impacted by a ‘work-to-rule’ and ‘overtime ban’ by the refuse crews.

In response to this a ‘casual workforce’ has been recruited to cope with any reduction in refuse collection. What we are finding is that random roads and sections of roads are not being collected by the ‘permanent’ refuse workers in their normal rounds. For example last Friday, three quarters of the Friday domestic ‘black bin bag’ refuse round in Moseley and Kings Heath Ward was not collected; hardly any of the recycling round was touched.

The Council is monitoring the tonnage collected by both the permanent and casual refuse crews. Wages are being docked where there has been a significant reduction in tonnage collected by the permanent staff, compared to prior to the industrial action – we are taking into account any absenteeism within crews when calculating any reduction in tonnage.

The casual crews have been operating for a week and are already exceeding by over 40% the daily tonnage collected by the permanent staff prior to the industrial action.

For example on Friday 31^st December

19 ‘casual’ crews picked up 508 tonnes, or 26.7 tonnes per crew

40 ‘permanent’ crews picked up 726.5 tonnes, or 18.1 tonnes per crew

At time of writing, the casual crews are in Moseley and Kings Heath Ward collecting any missed collections from last Friday.

Tomorrow the casual crews will be in north Moseley, collecting any missed collection by yesterdays (Tuesday) round. The following roads were not collected for black bin sacks:

Mayfield road
Top end of Anderton Park Road
Forest Road
Trafalgar Road and all the cul-de-sacs off it
One side of Church Road.

Our casual crews are now working seven days a week and our aim is to get to the point on Sunday, where our casual crews will collect missed collections the following day after the permanent crew.

I’m doing a daily drive around of the collection routes to identify any missed roads for the casual crew to pick up.

If you road has not had its black sacks picked up by 12noon by its normal permanent refuse round, please inform me. This way we’ll be able to send out the permanent crew out again on the same day.

With regards to recycling collections, these will be eventually be picked up. However, our current focus is on catching up with our black bin bag collection round.