Why does Birmingham have bin strikes so much?

>It was one of those sex discrimination cases where women in totally different jobs to men claim they should earn as much as them, and the courts inexplicably rule in their favour. No it wasn't, you should stop spreading this lie smearing the women. The council, through their own incompetence, put all workers like dinner ladies and bin men on the same sort of pay grade. [The contracts entitled refuse collectors and grave diggers to bonuses which were excluded from cooks, cleaners and care assistants](https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/comment/birmingham-city-council-s-discriminatory-pay-practices-are-indicative-of-widespread-problems/) among 49 jobs affected (that is where the equal pay comes in - the jobs with bonuses were male dominated, the jobs without bonuses were female dominated). The women **did not demand equal pay**, what they were was **equal treatment** [so they could get bonuses as well](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/apr/28/pay-female-staff-birmingham-council). This arrangement meant the jobs like bin men would get huge bonuses up to 160% of their pay in some cases - bin men in the 90s were on £51k with the bonuses - while female dominated jobs got nothing (a woman on the same pay grade got £12k (with a 160% bonus they'd have got £31k - still less than the bin men which reflects their different roles) . When the women found out they were excluded from the bonus scheme, they went to court. It is literally nothing like the Asda contract nonsense which was a bizarre decision saying the checkout jobs were equal to warehouse ones - BCC women were not saying the jobs were equal, but rather they wanted bonuses which they were excluded from. The council knew in 1997 that there was a problem and kept quiet until an audit in 2007 pointed out the problem and made it worse by [falsely claiming in a tribunal](https://archive.is/wip/5d6nM) that the bonuses were a reward for productivity, due to market forces and to discourage absenteeism which the tribunal described as: >a fig leaf to conceal a desire to pay the refuse workers very significantly more than their basic pay, and in that sense was a sham The tribunal also found that the bonuses were simply rewarding the workers for doing nothing more than their job (like pay a bonus so that you'd turn up to do the job you were paid for already...). They compounded it by appealing court cases for three years until the Supreme Court told them to pay up. Ask yourself this - if you worked for a firm and should have been entitled to a bonus but weren't and then found out that you'd not had the bonus because the money was used to give other people, *on the same contract*, the money instead, would you just accept that?