Stewart Paterson: We should value our cleansing workers as a lesson from the bin strikes

The streetscape in Glasgow city centre during the strike has been littered with … well, litter.

Anyone who has been in the city recently can’t have failed to notice the mountain of rubbish that has built up. It has not been pleasant.

READ MORE: Rubbish starts to accumulate on city streets as Glasgow cleansing workers join strike

It is said Eskimos have 50 words for snow.

The same level of lexical richness has been deployed by our citizens and visitors to describe the sights and smells we have endured since the cleansing workers took strike action to demand better wages in this cost of living crisis.

Filthy, dirty, manky, smelly, boggin’ bowfin, rank.

Putrid, vile, disgusting, clatty, minging, honking, stink.

I’m sure you can add more.

On Friday morning, just hours into the GMB cleansing workers in Glasgow joining the strike, rubbish was beginning to accumulate.

READ MORE: Is Glasgow the third dirtiest city in the world? We test Time Out magazine's verdict

Like many other people, I tried to imagine what a weekend’s worth of uncollected trash would look like.

By Monday we didn’t need to imagine.

Instead, we were treated to the full sensory assault from four days of an unchecked throwaway society.

Walking through the streets, not only were bins overflowing but garbage was left in piles beside, and carefully placed on top of, the bins.

Other impromptu piles were left randomly on the pavements, and then it was simply lying discarded, scattered all over the place.

There are a number of issues the visual impact of the strike has brought into the open.

The first is, how much do we value those who are doing what is unarguably a valuable job?

In monetary terms we, as a society, do not and never have, valued our cleansing and waste workers in direct correlation to how necessary the work is.

It is seen as a dirty job, a physically hard job, and a means of earning a living that most people would not pursue, given the choice.

It is, however, an essential job, one that without it we would quickly be in the grip of a public health emergency.

READ MORE: Top Glasgow council earners would get pay rise of more than £7k while workers get £1000 in pay offer

Disease would rapidly spread and vermin would run free on a scale that even the most dystopian pessimist couldn’t imagine.

Yet, those on the front line of our defence against a sanitation catastrophe are paid among the lowest compared with other occupations.

Around £10 an hour is what we pay workers to take away and process our household-generated waste and to pick up rubbish in the street, much of it sadly dropped at their feet by selfish, lazy people.

Public and environmental health must be worth more than that.

The other truth that the visuals from the strike have shown is how much unnecessary waste we are producing.

On Monday morning, for the Glasgow Times, a colleague and I walked around the city centre filming the scenes for the newspaper's facebook page.

What struck me were two things.

First, how quickly the streets turn into filthy squalor when the workers are not there to collect the bins.

Second, most of it, and by most, I mean more than 90%, is not necessary.

So much of the rubbish spilling out from the bins, left on top of the bins and tossed beside the bins, was from fast food takeaway outlets.

Coffee cups, soft drink cups, burger cartons, chicken buckets, sandwich wrappers, chip shop cartons, and plastic bottles made up most of what the everyday folk left behind.

It is finger licking bad and no-one is lovin it.

According to Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) figures Glasgow generated 266,000 tonnes of waste and recycled 79,000 tonnes in 2020. It was the lowest recycling rate in mainland Scotland, at 29%.

We are still generating too much and recycling not enough.

We need to stop producing so much unnecessary waste that is costing us dearly in both financial and environmental terms.

So, it is time we started paying those who do real essential work, work that without it society would very quickly be in trouble, a wage that reflects the importance of the task.

To illustrate this the head of neighbourhoods at the council, who is in charge of the cleansing service, is paid around £140k.

The pay offer would net him around £7k a year while the bin workers doing the graft would get around £1k.

That is rubbish.