Strikes cannot be ruled out as Fife’s refuse workers remain split on whether to accept council plans to change their shift patterns, with one union still looking at possible action.
This was made clear on Wednesday by Fife Council team leader Martin Kingham as he gave a presentation to councillors on an imminent mass shake-up of refuse collection services in the region.
From October 15 the council will extend bin collection hours from 6am to 9pm, Monday to Friday, and aims to save £800,000 per year by doing away with 28 refuse collection vehicles.
With no redundancies planned, it aims to achieve this by putting the workforce on a ”double shift” system which will extend the working day.
This saving was agreed as part of the budget set in February 2011 and since April 2011 discussions have been taking place with staff and unions about the changes.
Mr Kingham told the north-east Fife area committee that, with daily shift preparation work, he did not expect any bins to be emptied before 6.30am each day. Similarly, 8.30pm would likely be the time for final emptying as crews had to take the lorries back to their discharge points.
However, it was vital that the existing high-quality service was maintained and that the region’s 160,000 households were kept fully informed of what were ”fairly major” proposals.
Mr Kingham said information would be officially distributed to residents over the next month, backed up by reminder tags put on all bins.
Mr Kingham said it was be inevitable there would be inquiries from the public and, to assist, a 12-page briefing pack had been distributed to all Fife councillors.
He added that the move from a 7.5-hour shift pattern to a 15-hour shift pattern would lead to many bin-emptying services being ”out of synch”for a couple of weeks. He said ”extra measures” were being brought in to deal with that as 40% of households could wait more than two weeks for an uplift until the new system beds in.
To deal with this there would, in the short term after October 15, be blanket use of brown bins to store excess waste. Unfortunately their contents would go to landfill until service synchronisation was achieved.
Responding to questions by Howe of Fife councillor David MacDiarmid, Mr Kingham said there would be no redundancies. The main change was pattern of work.
He said efforts were being made to organise shifts in such a way to take into account work/life balance.
He confirmed, however, that one trade union understood by The Courier to be Unite has not yet signed up and had entered a formal disputes process. He said there was subsequently ”always the risk of strikes” but at this stage he couldn’t give a fuller answer, adding only that if strikes did happen, ”contingencies” would be in place.
The Courier has previously been told that 75% of Unison members have indicated their support for the change.
St Andrews councillor Dorothea Morrison said that during the fortnight when brown bins were being used for landfill material residents should be encouraged, where possible, to separate their own materials for recycling and take items to civic amenity sites themselves.