The Binmen of Birmingham - Marginal REVOLUTION

Thank-you! You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list.

I was on the British CapX Podcast talking about the Equality Act, riffing off my two posts Equality Act 2010 and The Apples and Oranges Tribunal. One thing I discussed in the podcast which I haven’t blogged on is the amazing Birmingham dustbin dispute.

In 2010 an employment tribunal ruled that Birmingham City Council had discriminated against thousands of female workers — cooks, cleaners, care assistants, caretakers — who were denied bonuses paid to the mostly male binmen, gardeners, and gravediggers. Why were the binmen given bonuses? Well, refuse collection is filthy, heavy, outdoor work and not many people want to be gravediggers. Thus, these jobs command a premium for exactly the reason Adam Smith gave in 1776 — compensating differentials. Or was it sexism? Well, note first that there is nothing stopping women from becoming "binpersons" and indeed there are female binpersons and they earn the same bonuses as their male counterparts (just as with the Next case). Moreover, we can test the sexism versus compensating differentials theory. Let’s see what happened.

Here’s the problem, which contributed to Birmingham going bankrupt in 2023. The council employs roughly 400 binmen and something like 6,000 women in comparable graded roles. Every extra pound paid to a binman therefore implied about fifteen pounds owed to the cooks and cleaners. The council simply didn’t have the money to pay everyone binman wages so they cut the binmen’s wages. But the market wage for collecting rubbish is what it is, so when Birmingham finally deleted the premium in January 2025, the binmen went on strike — and they are still on strike, nearly eighteen months later. The rubbish piled up, 17,000 tonnes of it, and the city declared a major incident.

Here’s the most amazing part. The council hired an outside contractor to take over its rubbish collection and it now pays roughly triple its pre-strike outsourcing bill–more than it was paying its own employees. So much for sexism. Apparently the premium wasn’t a favor to men; it was the price of the job. If you want your rubbish picked up and your graves dug, you must pay the market wage. This was pure regulatory arbitrage, of course. Because the new binmen were contractors they legally had a different employer than the Council’s female caregivers and the Act’s comparator rules stop at the employer’s nexus.

The government mandarins, of course, want to close the "loophole" adding yet another bureaucratic requirement to push the equal pay madness up the supply chain. The rubbish piles up.

Marginal Revolution University

See Courses

Learn more about Mercatus Center Fellowships

Learn More

Subscribe via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to updates.

Email Address

Subscribe

RSS Feed

Contact Us

Alex Tabarrok

Email Alex

Follow @atabarrok

Tyler Cowen

Email Tyler

Follow @tylercowen

Webmaster

Report an issue

Blogs We Like

Interesting People & Sites

Our Web Pages

Alex Tabarrok's Home Page

Alex's TED talk, how ideas trump crises

Conversations with Tyler

FDAReview.org

Tyler Cowen's Personal Web Page

Tyler's ethnic dining guide

Apply to Emergent Ventures

Books

Modern Principles of Economics

Tyler Cowen & Alexander Tabarrok