They really do expect me to do their work for them.
Apparently the high court has blocked the use of agency workers, which is a disgrace, frankly.
Okay, here’s how it’s going to play out. I will stop recycling and it all goes in the black bin from now on. I am not taking time out of my day, unpaid, to do the work for these shysters who want me to pick up the tab for their cost of living increase, as well as absorb my own. I pay the council a significant sum of money every year, mostly for stuff I neither want nor need. One of the very few things that they spend it on, that I actually want, is emptying the bins. Now the fuckers want me to pay for a dog and bark myself. Well, no. I might have a bonfire to get rid of the card waste, the plastic stuff can go in with the kitty litter.
Looks like the council has gone down the route of contracting out the service. Not a good idea, sounds a cheap option but that is only because these companies don’t pay good wages to employees. Too many services have been contracted out like the health care, like selling off council houses sounds good but isn’t. Costing council tax payers a lot more because the companies filling in the gap want to make a tidy profit.
Maybe if the council withheld the money that they would have paid to the contractors and sent rebates out to the ratepayers they might be justified in asking for your help. The only other reason for helping out would be to let the strikers know that you can do without them.
Good points, but probably lost on the strikers.
My favourite story on this subject dates back to when sky scraper buildings were popping up all over America. The buildings had elevators operated manually and also fully automated ones. People didn’t trust those new fangled automatic elevators and always went with the ones with a lift operator. Then the operators went on strike and people were faced with a choice between using the automated lifts or climbing several hundred flights of stairs. Once everyone realised that the automated lifts were perfectly safe, the lift operators were no longer needed. I remember that the notoriously belligerent print unions found themselves overtaken by technology in a similar way.
I’d like to think the same could happen here, but I don’t see an obvious alternative.
Stonyground, the same happened when the Victoria Line opened on the tube in London back in the ;60s. The trains could be driverless back then, but we still got clobbered by the unions demanding drivers!
Docklands trains go well now, despite no sign of anyone in charge these days…
I was impressed by the Docklands Light Railway when I did the London Marathon a few years ago. I believe that it was designed from the outset to be automatic, unlike the Underground or the railways in general.
My approach to recycling is to do what is the most convenient for me. For example, it is convenient to put bottles and waste paper into their bins, but empty tuna tins go to rubbish bin because rinsing them or having them smelling in their proper bin is not convenient. Basically, anything I would have to rinse or wash goes to rubbish bin. I bag all my rubbish.
I suspect most councils sub contract the work out now.
They won’t ever reduce council tax and let us sort out our own. Losing power and revenue is against all government thought processes. They would rather just keep collecting for something we don’t get and increase their profits so they can piss it away on bonuses.
Remember a couple of years back when there was a ‘mysterious’ fire in a recycling centre somewhere almost every week? That was down to the collapse of the resale price and the ban on sending it all to South East Asia to be ‘processed’ (actually put into landfill or dumped in the river). Faced with an ever increasing amount of worthless discarded plastic, something had to be done. Hmmm I wonder what that was? The stuff is worthless. The councils are locked into expensive contracts and it’d be politicaI suicide for them to say that it’s a failure. The best option would be to incinerate it but the greenies will be apoplectic if they go down that route. So it probably goes to landfill, either here when no-one is looking, or at the other end of a long and environmentally unfiendly sea journey. It’s all ecobollox.