Will Timms is a very busy man. The pest controller spends the days crossing the second largest city in the UK, Birmingham, to remove rats, cockroaches and other unwanted creatures from people’s houses.
Lately, Timms’s phone is still going to play, as about 17,000 trash metric tons have accumulated on the city streets.
“The smell is absolutely unbelievable,” Timms told CNN. “It has food rotting, there are larvae on the floor crawling out of the bags.”
Birmingham garbage collectors are on strike for salary reasons, so some of the city’s 1.2 million residents have not been collected for weeks.
Halls of garbage bags, some several meters high, dot the streets of red bricks like pins in a cork.
In the Balsall Heath neighborhood, the wind whistled through the drilling marks in a rotten pile where they hid.
“It’s a five -star restaurant for them (rats) and comes with a hotel,” said Timms.
Business is growing – so much so that Timms, who works alone, cannot deal with all cases and have given some jobs to competing pest controllers.
He said that the number of calls from people finding rats at home has increased by about 50% since the beginning of the garbage workers strike.
It is a portrait of a city in the sixth largest economy in the world – a place that once boosted the British Industrial Revolution that generates wealth, but which, less than two years ago, declared a bankrupt.
“There is garbage everywhere, everywhere… [eles são] bigger than cats, ”said Abid, a walker in Balsall Heath, CNN.
“This is the United Kingdom. This is 2025. What’s going on?”
Worker strike
Almost 400 garbage collectors are on strike due to the municipal government’s decision to eliminate a specific function.
Unite, a union that represents workers, argues that the measure blocks workers’ salary progression and lowers some employees, resulting in an annual salary cut of up to 8,000 euros (approximately R $ 51,000) in the worst cases.
Birmingham’s Municipal Council disputes this number and says it has offered alternative functions and opportunities for requalification to affected workers.
On the site, the board states that “no worker needs to lose money” and that changes in staff is a crucial part of the attempt to “become financially sustainable” and modernize the garbage collection service.
The bitter dispute recently entered the fourth consecutive month and intensified.
At first the strikes were intermittent, but in early March they became undefined.
Only some of the city’s garbage collectors and temporary employees are still working and, according to the board, less than half of the usual number of garbage trucks are currently operational.
Some parts of the city seemed much more affected than others when the CNN Visited last week.
On Monday (31), the Municipal Council stated that the accumulation of garbage and the risk to public health it represents had created an “serious incident”-an official mechanism that allowed employees to mobilize extra garbage trucks around the city.
The council reported that protesters blocked trucks that came out of garbage deposits, resulting in less collection in homes.
“It’s a dangerous, dirty, and extremely physically demanding work, so people deserve to be properly rewarded for it,” said Onay Kasab, Unite’s national director, to CNN.
Tourist city
The BBC series “Peaky Blinders”, on a criminal gang set in the 1920s Birmingham, put the city on the global map when it debuted over a decade – generating the tourist industry itself and bringing a very necessary prestige to the city.
At the end of 2023, the Municipal Council, administered by the UK ruler labor party presented a warning from Section 114 – as it is officially called the municipal version of bankruptcy – which interrupted all expenses, excluding essential services such as education and garbage collection.
The city has failed largely because a salary equality dispute that extends for many years means that there should be large sums on compensation to former workers-most of them women who received less than men for similar work.
But board errors have increased the pressures beyond control.
The demand for services has increased as the Brummies – a name given to residents of the city – live more, while the costs of providing these services have also increased.
It is a dilemma shared by local governments across the country, with many balancing on a financial bamba rope.
British local authorities receive much of the funding in the form of central government subsidies.
But the value of these subsidies has plummeted since 2010, when the former conservative government embarked in a decade economic adjustments designed to reduce the country’s debt after the financial crisis.
In England, the funding of the councils by resident – including subsidies and local taxes – is 18% below its level in 2010, on average, according to a June 2024 report of the Institute of Tax Studies.
Birmingham misfortunes weigh on Timms, the pest controller. “I’m furious with the look of the city,” he said about the recent garbage crisis. “It is affecting everyone’s health.”
Still, the flood of negative news bothers the birth Brummy because he obscures the complete truth about his hometown.
“Among the Brummies, there seems to be a solidarity, and it’s fantastic,” he said. “I love Birmingham intensely.”
