From The Metro: Binmen in Birmingham paid £225,000 in a single year
Very clever use of the plural - the article itself makes it clear that it was actually a team of five binmen who earned about £45,000 each. That seems pretty generous to me, but the working hours wouldn't suit everybody and the work itself is pretty unpleasant.
And as far as I can make out, the total cost of domestic refuse collection for the whole of the UK is about £3 billion or £4 billion or something, i.e. just over £100 per household, which doesn't seem extortionate to me.
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Misleading Headline Of The Day
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30 comments:
Just over £100 per household to have all your rubbish collected. You're right, that doesn't seem like too bad a deal at all. Far better than the BBC's demand for £145.00 for delivering rubbish.
Sounds fair. Really that's all we want from the Town halls.
Here's my £100. Now empty the f**ing
bin! Even if the lid is open!Empty it..Look..here's £200. Just ensure you empty the bins and never bother me again."
£45k is a heck of a lot of money for most people. I'd love to be on that sort of cash.
It may be anecdotal, but I remember not that long ago - when I first moved to London, so about 12 years ago - the binmen would actually come around the side of your house to get at your bins, empty them and then put them back.
Nowadays you have to put your bin by the road for them, and if it's not filled up the way that they want it or if it's overfilled or if you've used the wrong sort of bags, they won't take it.
The official wage for a binman is £26-28k, which I'd say is still on the overgenerous side as long as we have so many unemployed. You don't need much in the way of skills or experience to put rubbish in the back of the lorry, so it'd be an ideal candidate for workfare (i.e. you go out with a crew for one day a week and pick up rubbish or you don't get your dole money) which could greatly reduce the cost.
The issue highlighted in the article though is that although the pay is meant to be £26-28k for 37 hours, they were going out and working 24 hours on average last year, then going home. Then when all the rubbish hadn't been collected, they were getting paid overtime to go and get it - which is where the extra money was coming from (well, that and the fact that they get a £4k per year bonus for some reason).
As mentioned, I think £26k is a bit much for what is essentially unskilled manual labour, but when you add in the fact that you can do a 24 hour week (and note - that's an average, not an occasional thing), get a £4k bonus and get another £12k+ in overtime, it seems like they get a much better deal than they should...
A truly logical post MW - one that could never have the single word condemnation "Rubbish" applied to it!
TCO, the industry association says only about £70, so i rounded it up.
BQ, that's the spirit.
RA, what sort of salary would you be prepared to accept?
WFW, I 'refuse' to comment.
Cheaper to pay them overtime than hire another crew of 5; overtime doesn't get included in employer (ahem, taxpayer) pension contributions, doesn't attract extra employer (ahem, taxpayer) NI, doesn't need another wagon on a lease paid for by the Council (ahem, taxpayer), doesn't need extra training and mothering by the personnel people and keeps the inevitable Trade Union 5 members down on where it would have been which is rarely a bad thing, as far as I can see.
Might not be as bad a deal as it seems :o)
I was rather desperate for a job about 5 years ago - I'd have jumped for the chance to earn £26k (or the equivalent wage then) for manual labour with no qualifications (and considered it to be overpaid).
Way back in my past, I worked on the backdoor at a sainsbury's store - I spent most of my day loading and unloading lorries, and sorting goods out. Lost of heavy lifting (I was in much better shape then) and most of it outdoors (or at least in the receiving bay which had two massive great holes in it for lorries to back onto - so practically outdoors). I did that for £13k, which I considered to be good money at the time.
Adjusting this for inflation at RPI+2%p.a. gives a salary now of just under £21k (which I suspect is a lot more than Sainsbury's pay these days for the role). For that I had to work 39 hours per week (in theory - in practise I averaged about 45 hours per week and didn't get paid overtime).
So four years ago, I'd have happily worked 37 hours for £26k and thought myself to be getting the better end of the deal. Hell, for the real decrease in hours worked (from 45 to 37), I'd have done it for the same as I was paid at Sainsbury's without question - so call it £21k? If I could actually get away with only working 24 hours per week, then put the rest down as overtime (increasing the real wage by more than 70%), I'd likely have been willing to do it for about £16k (higher than the numbers would suggest, as I suspect the overtime isn't quite guaranteed).
Now I have something of a career and prospects, I'd be more reluctant - but still, if someone offered me £45k to go do the job, I'd do it, with very little in the way of questions asked. 5 years of training and hard work has led me to this point where I'm earning just over half that much...
FT: cheaper still to get them to do their 37 hours in the first place, rather than 24...
FT, good points.
RA, fair play to you. OT1H, £45k seems very overpaid to me as well, but OTOH £100 or so per household still seems pretty good value.
OK. You think £100 per household is good value. I'm a good capitalist. I reckon I can do it for less and actually make a good living. S'pose I offer to do it for £80? And my blokes will collect your bins from the side of the house, and they will be there every week.
That is, where's the competition? We have absolutely no idea at all whether £100 is a 'fair price'.
When we first went to live in Australia, our neighbours could scarcely believe that rubbish in Britain was collected by council employees instead of by contractors' staff.
Mind you, the Aussie binmen only collected household rubbish. If you wanted someone to collect your gum leaves you paid extra direct to another contractor.
Lola:"OK. You think £100 per household is good value. I'm a good capitalist. I reckon I can do it for less and actually make a good living. S'pose I offer to do it for £80? And my blokes will collect your bins from the side of the house, and they will be there every week.
That is, where's the competition? We have absolutely no idea at all whether £100 is a 'fair price'."
This one's been brought up before though, if it were something which were paid to the refuse collection company as a private service there would be a lot more people putting stuff in someone else's bin in order to not pay for theirs collecting.
Having said that though I don't see any reason why binmen need to be public sector workers, it could be a contracted out service paid for by the council, the council could be forced to publish how much it costs and open it up to tender regularly.
You couldn't really have 'competition' in bin collection, because the holes in the ground that the rubbish goes in (or the incinerators) are very expensive, and no-one would build or maintain such a facility if they only had the contract for a few years.
Or you'd end up with the situation that happens a lot in public sector tenders - the name on the lorry changes, but the lorry and the employees and the hole in the ground stay exactly the same. The price isn't going to change much from tender to tender.
Rubbish collection is one of those things that really has to be publicly organised (perhaps using private contractors) but subject to strict controls on cost (as should be the case on all public spending of course!).
L, D, SW, S, I thought that refuse collection was sub-contracted to competing providers, people like Veolia?
And SW & S nail it, refuse collection is a core function of the state, because you are not just paying for YOUR rubbish to be collected, you are paying for your NEIGHBOUR'S rubbish to be collected (or else he'd stick it in your bin etc). It's a public health issue in the true sense of the word.
But that's not to say the actual lorries can't be owned by, and binmen employed by private companies.
I don't agree that the binmen should necessarily own the hole in the ground, that'd likely be another provider.
And yes, I understand about paying for other peoples rubbish to be collected. But, in a truly libertarian world we'd be working on freedom AND responsibility (as MW proposes for planning liberalisation) so I could rely on my neighbours to get their rubbish sorted. If they didn't myself and my other neighbours would just have to have 'words'.
In any event proper outsourcing by LA's would sort lots of this. We'd be essentially outsourcing enforcement as part of our LVT payment. LA's are generally appalling at outsourcing well. But wadaya expect from bureaucrats?
May I just add something? Financial services is bedivilled by this sort of obfuscation. Doing the opposite - transparency -has been a fundamental principle and cornerstone in the success of my retail FS business. When we are in power and I'm MW's minister for FS, the banking system will be reformed (to the banks ultimate advantage - they just don't know it yet) and the stay on actions for unfair charges will be lifted, as will all the special privilidges that banks enjoy, and this scam will die a natural death.
L, however you cut and dice this, refuse collection is a public health issue and hence a core function of the state - the benefits of universal 'free at point of use' refuse collection vastly exceed the cash costs.
For sure, councils ought to give people a fair choice between weekly or fortnightly collection, whether you have to schlepp your bin onto the pavement or whether they collect from the side of the house or whatever, but if everybody else on your street votes for weekly (even though you'd be happy with fortnightly or even monthly), well you might as well chip in, because the hassle of charging you less for missing out your house every other week is just too much.
And once a borough has democratically voted on what level of service it wants, the council should do an open tender (which most of them do anyway).
In any event, this would be best financed by a modest sales tax on new goods (about 1% should do it) so when you buy something new, you are pre-paying its disposal cost (or paying for the cost of disposing of the old fridge/mattress/whatever when you buy a new fridge/mattresss/whatever) - not with the f-ing stupid land fill tax.
"Having said that though I don't see any reason why binmen need to be public sector workers, it could be a contracted out service paid for by the council, the council could be forced to publish how much it costs and open it up to tender regularly."
Comment of the century, so far. Have you been asleep for the last fifteen-twenty years?
MW, may I throw in another tuppence worth?
Personally I agree with the previous commenter that refuse collection should be a pubic service, provided and paid for by residents for the reasons stated.
However, if the 'service' is to be put out to tender, rather than councillors deciding the result of the tender process, should not that decision be made by those who are actually going to pay for whatever level of service that is being tendered and thereby decide what level they want viz-a-viz cost?
Local democracy - or perhaps local authorities don't believe in local democracy, following the lead given by central government?
Ok, administration of putting tenders out to public decision may be costly, but can one put a price on democracy?
As matter of fact in WODC our new provider (now 2 months into contract) still can't get it right! Having been told to put bins out, they don't come and then turn up the following week when there are no bins!
I'd have to say that refuse collection as a pubic service is maybe going too far.
I don't know about you guys but I prefer an old-fashioned bin.
Careful now MW, that 1% sales tax sounds very like VAT to me.................. :)
Oh yes 1 percent disposal cost , and how long would it be 1 percent , ffs aren't we paying enough tax.
"councils ought to give people a fair choice between weekly or fortnightly collection": when we lived in Edinburgh the collections were twice-weekly. City of flat-dwellers, you see.
BE, I genuinely thought it was contracted out.
WFW: ... if the 'service' is to be put out to tender, rather than councillors deciding the result of the tender process, should not that decision be made by those who are actually going to pay?"
Yes of course.
S, nope, VAT is 20% and is just a tax on free exchange of goods and services and should be scrapped. A 1% charge on new goods is a pre-payment of disposal costs thereof.
ArtCo, your choice - 20% VAT under the current lot, or a 1% 'refuse collection contribution' when I'm in charge.
D, if that's what people want then let them have it. Did you use rubbish chutes into an almighty bin in the cellar?
A 1% charge 'on new goods' would be impossible to police let alone collect. There would have to be a lower threshold, otherwise how would you manage to collect it from small traders? Or people who sell stuff at car boot sales? What about tradesmen who sell stuff to householders - does a new boiler, or a new window frame have 1% sales tax or not? Do biscuits have sales tax? They come in packaging. What about loose fruit and veg?
What about businesses? They generate plenty of waste too. Who pays for that? What about businesses that sell to trade and private buyers? How can they tell if their customers are trade or business? If someone says they're trade, how can you tell?
Seems more problematic than VAT to me!
"Did you use rubbish chutes into an almighty bin in the cellar". No, from our Georgian flat we carried sacks downstairs. Each flat did have its own cellar though - we didn't use ours, I must admit. Clearly it must have been undertaxed.
My brother had an Art Deco flat - I think he might have had a chute.
S, if you read my comment properly, you'll see I said "new goods at point of sale" (for clarification: retail point). So clearly it doesn't apply to car boot sales, because that stuff is second hand (to charge again would be double taxation).
Then, as ever, you apply commonsense:
"There would have to be a lower threshold, otherwise how would you manage to collect it from small traders?"
How do you think they manage to collect income tax, PAYE, VAT and so on from small traders?
"What about tradesmen who sell stuff to householders - does a new boiler, or a new window frame have 1% sales tax or not?"
Yes of course they do because the old boiler and old windows will be thrown away. But the tradesman doesn't need to charge his customer because the 1% will be paid at the B&Q shop.
"Do biscuits have sales tax? They come in packaging."
You've applied commonsense and answered your own question.
"What about loose fruit and veg?"
Does a lot of fruit and veg get thrown away? Yes. So it would have a sales tax.
D, ta for clarification. In turn: when I'm in charge there won't be a tax on cellars or any other part of the building, the tax will be on the site itself.
Clearly the rubbish threads are more popular! ;-)
I don't throw any fruit and veg away at all. I compost it all. can I have my 1% back please?
SO, but we've covered a lot of ground, haven't we?
L, nope, I don't do special pleading. Think of the money you'll save on your second hand cars (no VAT) and the fact that you won't have to pay for having them scrapped - you pay for your car scrappage via fruit and veg, so to speak.
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