It’s a week today since the Edinburgh bin strike started and the chaos is getting harder to ignore.
The capital’s pavements are littered with overflowing bins and the city’s image has taken a hammering among the thousands of festival-goers currently sidestepping heaps of rotting waste on their way to the next show.
How much worse can it get before union negotiators and Cosla chiefs reach an agreement over pay?
It hardly bears thinking about.
But now the rest of us are in for a taste of the misery too.
The bin men in Edinburgh are on strike and this is what it looks like at day 2.
People love to say "no skill jobs" and look down on them yet when our areas look dirty or people don't bring our groceries we moan.I hope they get what they are on strike for! pic.twitter.com/ZGDWB8ALUZ
— momo 🌸 (@conceptKitty) August 21, 2022
Refuse staff in Dundee and Angus began industrial action on Wednesday as the national pay dispute escalated.
Workers in Perth and Kinross will begin their strike on Friday, with more action planned for next month.
Colleagues in Fife will also join the next round of action.
As with so many issues, the bin strike has become a political football.
For every critic blaming Edinburgh’s Labour-led council, there’s another claiming the fault lies with the SNP for reducing the funding it makes available to local authorities to deliver public services.
Meanwhile, the rubbish piles higher, the photographs get bleaker, the rats have a field day and the residents grow increasingly sick of the squalor on the streets.
We have seen what a bin strike can do to Scotland’s capital city in under a week.
We don’t need to see it here.
But we do need to see wise heads set aside the political point-scoring and get down to the dirty business of thrashing out a solution to this mess.
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