City refuse dispute - a management failure

We have now entered the third week of the damaging strike by refuse workers and there seems to be total impasse. While rubbish accumulated in the streets, the Council Leader, Richard Brett was away in Bournemouth at the Liberal Democrat Party Conference instead of finding ways to resolve the dispute. Daily we see the inevitable and unnecessary spectacle of picket lines, bonfires and entrenched views. I have expressed my support for those taking strike action but have refrained from commenting in detail before now.

Why have Leeds Councillors and City Managers led us into this mess? This morning I received the latest expensive-to-send letter from Leeds Environmental Services apologising for the disruption and trying to explain the background to the dispute. Reading it we are led to believe that the dispute arises due to union intransigence over modernisation and flexibility and their members refusal to accept the financial consequences of equal pay legislation in respect of a small number of workers including those who work on refuse vehicles.

I am not so easily convinced. In my years of experience on Leeds Council and as an MP I have yet to meet employees who are inflexible to change and who do not accept that some times when wage rates are rationalised some might go down as well as up. In Leeds managers seem to have engineered a process whereby some rates will change to the extent that certain employees will lose up to 30% of their salary. Moving from £17000 per annum to £12000 is very serious. That this confrontation ihas developed in such terms reveals for me an abject failure of leadership by Senior Councillors and Managers in Leeds. What they have done is to force both sides into corners where resolution appears intractable and while the rats accumulate in the bins and piles of rubbish we are heading towards changes that no one really wants. First we will see the inevitable introduction of collections moving from once a week to once a fortnight and this will be because the cost of ending the current dispute will take money that needed for normal collections. Secondly we will see the extended use of private contractors and, at a stroke, the management of the refuse teams will be moved away from democratic control. Thirdly we will have to endure lower standards of service and cleanliness because the workforce will have lower morale. In the private sector the same loyalty to the community does not exist.

The way forward is arbitration - reaching a good old-fashioned and fair compromise. The Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) or an independent person agreeable to all parties should be brought in and I would ask both sides to agree that the outcome would be binding. The cleanliness and health of our city is much too important to be a subject for political posturing or hidden agendas.

Now there is a new twist. In the midst of the dispute the Counil has announced that it is to seek the tenders for a privately operated refuse disposal service and it is understood that councillors will not contemplate a bid from their own managers to run a future non-privatised service. To now make employees' future even less secure seems a recipe deliberately designed to inflame the situation.

I thought were were out of the age of industrial confrontation in the City administration. Sadly our leaders do not seem to have moved on.

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