Britain’s second-largest city has declared a “major incident” after a sanitation worker strike left over 17,000 tons of uncollected garbage on the curbside.
“It’s regrettable that we have had to take this step, but we cannot tolerate a situation that is causing harm and distress to communities across Birmingham,” John Cotton, leader of Birmingham city council, said in a statement.
Photos taken by Reuters in Birmingham this month show mounds of uncollected trash overflowing from collection bins and dumpsters.
The dispute between the city and its garbage collectors stretches back to December 2024, when the trade group Unite the Union announced that collectors would strike in 2025 against overpay cuts, a ban on overtime, and the council’s elimination of a waste collection role.
The city said in a statement on March 28 that “all workers have been offered alternative employment at the same pay, driver training or voluntary redundancy,” and claimed that the eliminated role posed a liability for city budgets.
“Birmingham council could easily resolve this dispute but instead it seems hellbent on imposing its plan of demotions and pay cuts at all costs,” said Sharon Graham, secretary of Unite the Union, in a statement on Monday. “If that involves spending far more than it would cost to resolve the strike fairly, they don’t seem to care.”
Since the dispute began, union members have voted numerous times to escalate their strike as the city began using temporary workers to pick up the growing piles of trash throughout Birmingham. Those contractor pickups have been blocked by picketing workers.
In their statement on Monday, the city council claimed that the “daily blocking of our depots by pickets has meant that we cannot get our vehicles out to collect waste from residents.”
Declaring a major incident would allow the city to bypass the picket lines and clean the streets, the city council statement said.
The sanitation workers, meanwhile, claim that the city’s declaration amounts to “strike breaking.”
The British government is aware of the strike, Minister of Communities Jim McMahon said in a speech to Parliament on Monday.
“Well-established arrangements are in place for local areas to escalate issues where they do need support and the government is monitoring the situation closely,” McMahon said, according to British newswire service PA Media.
“If local leaders on the ground in Birmingham feel that tackling these issues goes beyond the resources available to them and they request national support,” McMahon continued, “then of course we stand ready to respond to any such request.”