Birmingham bin workers’ strike shows essential workers deserve support – and a decent wage

Once upon a time I was a road sweeper for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I swept very posh streets around Chelsea, off the King’s Road. Despite getting up at 5.30am to get to the depot by 6.15am, I loved the work. Why, you may ask. Well, it was straightforward. You had pavements to clean and clear of rubbish and dead leaves.

You could see the achievement before your eyes. A swept street had a beauty to it. And surprisingly, most people were thoughtful and talked to me. I worked over Christmas and people gave me money and mince pies. Always tired I nonetheless felt useful, and I was doing an essential job in the community; even a posh community. 

In some ways society is what, in printers’ terms, you would call ‘arsyversy’, meaning upside down. Some of the most essential jobs are paid the least. Nurses and dustmen, road sweepers and road labourers. Hospital porters, deliverymen. All keep society going.

Of course there are dozens of jobs that keep society going but the essential dustman, road sweeper and the removers of rubbish from our houses and streets are looked upon as if surplus to civilisation. Yet society often breaks down when essential refuse collectors are not there to clean and clear up. 

The Birmingham binmen’s strike is a case in point. Led by the union Unite, it is a struggle for better conditions and better wages for these most essential of workers, with the strike now into its second year. Social justice dictates that we provide better working conditions and better terms for this most important public service. That we don’t allow the prejudices about such unattractive tasks, cleaning up after the public, to continue.

The fight has woken up many people to the incredible importance of clean streets to the health and wellbeing of us all. Of having our bins emptied and our pavements swept. 

There was no romance in my ending up sweeping streets. I was not doing a George Orwell and wanting to know how the ‘other half’ lived. I wasn’t on a mission to see what life at the bottom of the social pile was like. My mission was to earn money while avoiding the police, who sought me for various wrongs. And doing a public service was a good place to hide.

Many of my fellow road sweepers were men who had formerly worked on building sites and as their health failed, they ended up doing this supposedly menial task. Some were drunks, rough sleepers, using weird names to hide from something or other. 

I myself was cushti, having a girlfriend with an allowance and a room in a Jamaican house in the World’s End, Chelsea. I was also a Marxist-Engelsist-Leninist-Trotskyist: a MELTIST, trying – unsuccessfully – to melt capitalism. I was 23 and writing some of the worst poetry known to man. 

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But come forward 57 years and the old struggles continue. How do you give such an essential worker a decent, liveable wage? How do you break the dismissive opinion that ‘anyone could be a bin man or a road sweeper’? That you don’t need complex training, or education. So therefore don’t be too generous to those who are there to keep you safe and clear of the rubbish produced by consumerism. 

The reality is that many jobs that ensure our wellbeing are apparently unskilled and lacking in variety. The Birmingham bin strike throws up the reality behind this supposedly rather unimportant job: cleaning up. But Birmingham is suffering because what could have been ended over a year ago has dragged on, costing vast sums of money and unhealthy streets. Rats and mice have multiplied, creating a feeling that civilisation is on the rocks. 

Society often rewards jobs that don’t have such an important social profile. The bin strike is a case in point. When I was a road sweeper I might have been living in a vastly changing society without
realising it. Change it did, through the 1970s and 1980s, creating almost a division between the earlier decades that I lived through as a child and young man and the later generations I was maturing into.

Yet little has changed in attitudes towards jobs that are looked down on as unimportant – until the worker stops doing the job. Then you have that sense that civilisation is at an end. 

Are we ever going to suitably reward those that are considered the great unskilled? Are we ever going to seriously see them as essential workers that keep society going? They wake up before us and apply themselves to doing hundreds of essential jobs – repairing, cleaning, ordering, delivering, driving – so that we can get on with our lives uninterrupted. 

Truly the world is upside down and we underappreciate at our peril the labours of the great overlooked. 

Surely the government could do us all a favour and end the bin strike in Birmingham and end this ordeal over wages and conditions for such important workers. Let us not continue the pretence that labour should be got cheap because it doesn’t involve masses of exams to attain work. If it is needed by us all then it requires the qualifications of being there to ensure our ability to carry on with our lives unimpeded. 

Let’s hope the government can put its shoulder to the wheel and help us bring social justice to this painful situation in the UK’s second city.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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