Garbage piles up in Birmingham as the U.K. city’s sanitation strike enters 5th week

LONDON — There is a stink rising over the United Kingdom’s second-largest city.

Garbage has piled up for a month in Birmingham during a dispute between the city and its trash collectors. It is a sore sight for eyes and offensive to the nose. Mountains of garbage are said to be visible from space and people have complained of seeing rats as big as cats in the refuse.

“You can see the juice flowing out of the bags onto the road. It stinks,” Naeem Yousef said. “It’s bringing down the areas. People are saying, ‘Look at these areas, how dirty these people are.'”

Talks failed to reach an agreement Monday but were scheduled to resume Tuesday as the strike enters its fifth week.

Members of Unite, the union representing garbage truck workers, walked off the job March 11 over the elimination of a job position and painful pay cuts. The council said it’s made a reasonable offer, that cuts would only affect a small number of jobs and the jobs being eliminated are unnecessary.

The Labour-run Birmingham City Council is effectively bankrupt because of a settlement over historic pay discrimination. As a result, it’s had to make significant budget cuts of 300 million pounds ($383 million) over two years and is only providing services required by law, including waste collection.

As heaps of black bags littered sidewalks with their contents spilling out of holes chewed by critters, the city council declared a major incident to bring in additional cleanup crews and vehicles.

Photos on news sites and social media show furniture, mattresses and car bumpers illegally dumped alongside bulging trash bags. In one neighborhood, garbage sacks were set ablaze.

The U.K.’s Labour government has come under fire from opposition parties because of the problem, but Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister, told members of the House of Commons that it’s a local issue and the government was pressing the two sides to reach an agreement.

“Our priority is tackling the misery and disruption for residents,” Angela Rayner said. “It is essential to protect public health by tackling the backlog of waste.”

Kevin Hollinrake, a Conservative member of Parliament, said the situation was “a national embarrassment” and could become a public health emergency with warm temperatures forecast later in the week.

Birmingham, a city of more than 1 million residents 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of London in the Midlands of England, has been here before. A garbage strike in 2017 brought similar chaos and lasted seven weeks in the heat of summer.

Picketing workers have been blamed for blocking dump trucks from leaving depots until police stepped in. But even with some trucks rolling, the immense quantity of refuse is overwhelming and options for residents to get rid of their waste are limited and time-consuming.

Drone footage on the BBC that was shot Friday showed a milelong (1.6 kilometer) traffic backup to a mobile dump site.

Vanita Patel said she was depositing her garbage in relatives’ bins outside Birmingham. Yousef, meanwhile, removed the equipment from his work van to deliver his rubbish and that of his neighbors to a local dump site, where he had to make an appointment.

“It’s like winning a lottery now to try and get a booking,” he said.