I’ve always had a soft spot for bin men – or refuse collectors as we generally call them these days. It used to be dustmen, as I remember from the song by Lonnie Donegan in my infancy: ‘Oh, my old man’s a dust man/He wears a dust man’s hat/He wears “cor blimey” trousers/And he lives in a council flat!’ Donegan made it sound a jolly business, but being a bin man is no picnic. The first in this country were recorded in the 1350s as ‘rakers’ and their presence coincided with the plague. It’s one of the most hazardous jobs around, probably more so than being a policeman. But then, the way the police swerve actual crime in favour of thought-crime these days, being a florist is probably more dangerous than being a policeman. Bin men routinely risk injuries from broken glass, medical waste and caustic chemicals, as well as those which come from working with heavy machinery and in close proximity to traffic.

Brighton – or any city – can’t survive without our bin men

Because of this I find them somewhat heroic, which is why I automatically took their side in the current contretemps between them and Brighton & Hove council. The Daily Mail reported last week:

Rubbish is piling up high on the streets of Brighton after a number of bin lorries were ‘sabotaged’ following job losses at a council depot. Refuse collections in the city have been cut back after the vehicles were targeted in the wake of a report last year into claims of racism, sexism and bullying among staff…

… The independent report was commissioned by Brighton and Hove Council after whistleblowers came forward alleging a ‘toxic’ working environment at the Hollingdean depot of Cityclean, the council’s waste collection service…

…Council leader Bella Sankey described the vandalism as ‘unlawful and scandalous’ and said they would ‘not be held to ransom by these people…the sabotage and resulting disruption of recent weeks show there is a small minority who are disrupting our waste and recycling service’.

Of course, I’m not in favour of racism, sexism or bullying. (Maybe just a little bit of bullying if people are particularly wet, or vote Lib Dem.) Anyone who can’t behave in a civilised manner to their work colleagues deserves to lose their job. But whatever the specifics here, I do believe that we don’t value our bin men properly.

If I was one, I’d be annoyed that I earned so little for providing this most essential of services while useless middle-class mates of council leaders waltzed into totally unnecessary jobs, as they’ve been doing most shamelessly in Sadiq Khan’s London. I’d be annoyed that I had to go out in all weathers, first thing in the morning, while everyone else seems to be ‘working from home’ which often means doing goodness knows what in their trackies.

A report revealed last week that the grounding of 750,000 putative passengers in last summer’s airport meltdown was partly due to staff working from home. It took an hour and a half for an actual engineer to ‘arrive on-site in order to perform the necessary full system restart which was not permitted remotely’. Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary quite understandably scoffed: ‘The CAA report confirms unbelievably that Nats engineers were sitting at home in their pyjamas on the UK’s August bank holiday weekend, which is one of the busiest travel weekends of the year for air travel.’

Seagulls were one of the few beneficiaries of Brighton’s bin strikes (Credit: Getty Images)

As for the Brighton bin men, it’s the ‘toxic’ culture of the city’s Hollingdean depot which is being blamed this time. As I’ve said already, I have no truck with sexists, racists and bullies – but Brighton council does have previous when it comes to being unable to get along with the people who make our streets civilised.

We’ve had repeated strikes, and in the past no one mentioned toxic behaviour on the part of our humble heroes. In the summer of 2001, under a Labour council, a strike left piles of rubbish on the streets of my beloved city. Inexplicably, refuse collection had been privatised in Brighton – while most of East Sussex kept it in-house and suffered no such problems. Sita, the French company running it, were forever messing with the schedule, changing routes and sacking bin men. The bin men didn’t go for this, and eventually went on strike, though they did very sweetly offer to work for nothing and clear the rubbish on a voluntary basis when it piled up too much. But the council said no, in case it upset Sita.

Sita seemed to get upset quite easily, though maybe it would have been more appropriate for the local taxpayer to feel this way as the French company was being paid £6.7 million a year by the council to keep the streets clean, and somehow managing to fail dismally at this. All the while they made losses of around £250,000 a week – or were until they threw in the towel.

There were further Brighton bin strikes in 2013 and 2014 and then a big one in 2021, under the Green council, during which a Conservative councillor opined that: ‘You can’t negotiate with terrorists’. Brighton bossy boots of all persuasions were united as one when it comes to disrespecting men they’re not fit to lick the smelly boots of. But after two weeks, the bin men won. As Tribune put it:

Refuse workers at Cityclean are some of the lowest paid staff in a city with extortionate rental and property prices. For months and months during the pandemic, we saw politicians of all parties clapping, banging saucepans, and generally singing the praises of the front-line workers who kept the country going. Bin lorry drivers are exactly those front-line workers – they didn’t work from home on laptops, but kept going throughout, risking their own health to keep our city clean.

And now we’re there again; the bin strikes are starting to seem like an extra Brighton season, bound to come around just like springtime. But this time, things are so run down here that it feels like the final straw. As the Mail put it:

The latest crisis over Brighton’s bins comes as the city has been facing a slew of problems over the past few years. The council has been slammed for ploughing money into failed ‘pet projects’ while residents rage over the issue along with potholes and drug-fuelled homelessness. Residents say the once-beautiful seaside resort is a shadow of its former self, ruined by a council – which has announced it will increase tax – that has wasted money on projects like banning weedkiller and a futile Low Traffic Neighbourhood scheme.

Brighton could survive without its baristas. Without its councillors. Heck, even without its hacks, though it pains me to say so. But we – or any city – can’t survive without our bin men. They stand between us and submergence into squalor and sickness and stink. Mrs Thatcher was right about many things, but she was very wrong about there being no such thing as society. There is very much such a thing as society, but only because of the workers.

It’s only thanks to people like bin men and shop assistants and the other undervalued and abused members of the workforce that we are not drowning in our own filth. We disrespect them at our peril, as the humming streets of the fair city of Brighton & Hove may well prove again this summer.