Car battery wires 'chewed by rats' as fed-up Birmingham residents say 'we're not a third world country'

Staff at Heartlands Auto Centre have been forced to repair around 15 cars with chewed battery cables

The bin strike continues to cause problems for the people of Birmingham with many businesses also being impacted.

One of those is Heartlands Auto Centre, owned by Suhail Sadiq, where rats have chewed through battery cables inside vehicles.

He has now called for "the whole council" to be fired while speaking to The Guardian.

"The amount of cars we’ve got coming in now with wiring chewed up by rats is unbelievable," he said.

He continued: “Why should we be dragging our bins across Birmingham?

"The whole council from top to bottom should be fired. We’re not in a third world country. We’re in England."

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Downing Street said the Unite should “focus on negotiating in good faith” and “drop their opposition” amid the almost four-week strike.

Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, responded by saying “not surprising that many workers in Britain question the Labour government’s commitment to working people".

Angela Rayner held a summit on Saturday night with council leaders to try to solve the crisis.

The strike has come following the council’s plan to scrap the role of waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO) in order to save cash.

The build-up of black bags echoes the bin strike of 2017 when refuse collectors went on strike in the city over plans to cut jobs.

It rumbled on for seven weeks and ended with the agreement that some working conditions would change, and the council would create the role of WRCO.

Each waste lorry in Birmingham has a driver and three workers at the back who collect bins and empty them into the cart.

Two are loaders, grade-two jobs, and one is a WRCO, a grade-three job, paid up to £8,000 more, for extra responsibilities such as collecting data on a tablet which is nicknamed the “slab in the cab”.

Lawyers successfully argued at an employment tribunal that these extra responsibilities didn’t really exist and the tablet disappeared within a week.

This was reportedly “job enrichment” and a way for the council to pay some of the staff more.

Those lawyers were Leigh Day, acting on behalf of women working in council roles that didn’t get those kinds of perks traditionally female-dominated functions such as teaching assistants, cleaners and caterers.

The WRCO job was used as a comparable by Leigh Day to demonstrate that the council discriminated against women in favour of men.

Birmingham had created the WRCO role five years after it had lost a landmark equal pay claim in 2012, when it had given bonuses to refuse collectors and street cleaners but not to cleaners and caterers.

One worker recently told BirminghamLive that until an agreement is struck between Unite and the council, we're all going to have to "make do with the cards we’ve been dealt".