If you want to understand what has gone wrong with Britain, there is probably no better place to start than Birmingham.
As of this month, Birmingham’s refuse collectors have been on strike for a whole year, with no obvious end in sight. At the worst point, 23,000 metric tons of rubbish were left uncollected, with queues of residents reaching up to a mile long at mobile collection points. Rats the size of kittens roamed on the streets. Birmingham, England’s second city, had quite literally become a dump.
The crisis began in 2012, when 174 female employees of Birmingham City Council successfully sued the city for what they claimed was “pay discrimination.” Now, given this is no longer the 1970s, no one was accusing Birmingham of paying women less than men for performing the same roles. Indeed, this was not “discrimination” as anyone might traditionally understand it. Instead, under the terms of the Equality Act 2010, equal-pay claims can succeed if a court determines that two entirely different jobs in the same company or public body are of the “same value.”
The UK Supreme Court agreed that Birmingham had been underpaying staff in “female-dominated” positions, such as cleaners and teaching assistants, relative to “male-dominated” roles like bin men and street cleaners, despite these jobs having nothing obvious in common with each other (and despite many of these male roles being more physically demanding, dirtier, and requiring unsocial hours).
Since 2012, the council has paid out more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in equal-pay claims to thousands of mostly female employees. As a result, in 2023, Birmingham City Council, the largest municipal authority in Europe, was forced to effectively declare bankruptcy. By then, it still had around £760 million ($1 billion) worth of claims to settle.
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