Lazy gits.

By bir_hazz
December 9th, 2005 @ 3:17 PM Uncategorized

So the Sandwell binmen turned down

6 Comments so far

  1. Stephen Booth (unregistered) on December 11th, 2005 @ 11:31 pm

    What you have to remember (and of course the press won’t ever tell you) is that refuse collectors have a very low basic salary and rely on bonuses for working on statutory holidays to make it up to a reasonable wage. Typically bonuses make up 30% or more of their total income. Losing those bonuses or having them cut can be the difference between making and not making their mortgage or rent payments.


  2. Stephen Booth (unregistered) on December 12th, 2005 @ 8:33 am

    Incidentally, on the icy steps thing, there’s a very good chance that it’s not that they refused to climb the steps but that they were instructed not to. It’s not unusual for managers to try to limit their liability by instructing their staff to not do things that are even just moderately risky. That way if they get injured the manager can ckaim that they were acting beyond or contrary to their instructions so the employer isn’t liable. Or they to try to cut times by instructing staff not to do time consuming tasks. One refuse collection manager in Birmingham instructed his staff to only collect sacks that had been left at the edge of the pavement (not by the front of the house or in front yards) and sent leaflets to all the houses saying that only sacks on the edge of the pavement would be collected. The rationale was that even though crossing the pavement to pick up the sack and back again only took about a second, if you added all those seconds up, by not doing that they could shave between 20 and 30 minutes per wagon off each shift. This saved a significant amount of money off his budget, the extra cost of dealing with the complaints and sending a special collection out to pick up the left over sacks came out of someone else’s budget. An important step for understanding how public sector finance works in reality is to understand that a saving off your budget that results in a greater over spend on someone else’s budget will still count in your favour as much as if it didn’t cause an over spend elsewhere.


  3. Hazz (unregistered) on December 12th, 2005 @ 10:06 am

    Erm… If they’re so hard off, why are they turning down nine hundred pounds then?


  4. Stephen Booth (unregistered) on December 12th, 2005 @ 10:04 pm

    In the hope of getting


  5. Hazz (unregistered) on December 12th, 2005 @ 10:50 pm

    Ah, so they’re both lazy and fucking greedy.


  6. Gaz (unregistered) on December 18th, 2005 @ 11:58 am

    Here’s a link to the original story, since I had no idea what y’all were talking about until I found this. :p



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