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Notes -
I can't be the only one getting tired of the same couple topics, so here's some comparatively lighthearted fare. Well — if one can call lighthearted anything involving a first-world nation flirting with plague.
https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1909607333090513144
Long story short: The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men. They also employ cooks, cleaners, and caregivers for the elderly; these are mostly women.
At some point someone noticed that the former set of workers tended to earn more than the latter. A lawsuit was launched which argued that this was obvious sexism and a violation of the Equality Act since, in aggregate, male employees were getting paid more than female employees. The lawsuit succeeded, which spawned countless followup lawsuits. Any woman working in a job which paid less than a typically-male job was suddenly able to sue for damages, and consequently the Council has paid out over a billion pounds in equal pay compensation. The Council estimates that it is likely to have to pay an additional 800 million or so pounds before the thing has run its course.
Naturally, they also had to fix the problem, and so slashed the pay of garbagemen, road workers, grave diggers, and so on to match the female average. (Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B, and certainly isn't possible now, as they're already basically bankrupted.) Unfortunately, it seems that people aren't interested in doing those jobs for so much less pay, and have declined to continue.
Result: Ever-growing piles of garbage all over the place, leading to a massive population of disease-bearing rodents and other pests. Weil's disease and hantavirus are suddenly major concerns. And, as the average daily temperature rises, the already-unspeakable miasma is getting worse. And no one can do anything about it, since, afaict, it's not allowed for the private sector to 'compete' with the government.
No one's even arguing that it's different pay for the same job. It's universally agreed that it's different pay for different jobs. However, the rhetoric here has to do with the value of the job not economically, but in some ineffable moral sense. Supporters of the move argue that surely the 'value' of the predominantly-female jobs must be the same as the predominantly-male jobs. To think otherwise would apparently imply that female labor is less 'valuable' than male labor, which in turn would imply that women are less 'valuable' than men.
What can one say in reply? It's one of those things where all one can do is shake one's head. Especially in Birmingham, where anyone considering pointing out some obvious considerations on the matter is liable to be charged with misogyny. And modern polite white society doesn't seem to have any kind of defense against women's tears.
All in all it's one of the clearest examples I've ever seen of wokeness destroying a society's ability to perform basic functions.
Birmingham is, FWIW, the economic and cultural center of the Midlands region, and Britain's second-largest city after London. Now it's facing problems which sound like something out of its medieval era.
And I have to wonder: if it happened there, can it happen in London?
To add some of my own commentary, this seems to me an example of the impossibility of compromise with wokeness. There can be no detente. Wokeness can never rest until it has erased all practical distinctions between human beings, and one generation's gracious, ostensibly common-sensical compromise ('equal pay for the same job') not only doesn't address the real problem but serves as a springboard for the next generation's 'equal pay for different jobs', e.g.
The fundamental relationship between men and women hasn't been harmonious since Eden at the latest, but it has at least remained functional throughout most of history. When I see the above, it occurs to me that one side effect is even fewer men able to generate enough income to provide for a family or maintain the respect of potential mates. Another straw on the camel's back.
And the thread is full of people saying the decision is perfectly reasonable and that "bin men" are overpaid, e.g. "Mollie"
And yet women weren't signing up in droves for the job when it paid so much better. I can't see why?
Some did! Lost the source but I read that something like 20% of the garbage workers were women, though life experience has taught me that they were probably not actually doing the same work as the men. Can't help but wonder how all of this occurs to the women who were willing and able to do the job. Their perspective hasn't been represented anywhere that I've found.
That would surprise me. I have literally never seen a bin-woman in my life.
Although the Birmingham case got the same result as one involving the clothing retailer Next. In that case, the shop-floor staff were getting paid less than the staff in the warehouse. The funny thing is, for Next, women were a majority in both areas. However, since the female majority was smaller in the warehouse, the tribunal ruled there was a case to answer (while also admitting that there was no actual discrimination happening, and that the jobs weren't the same).
It baffles me that these tribunals have the power to just dictate what jobs should pay.
I think this is the part of the story that's more important than wokeness or whatever; that ideological judges have such power in determining policy.
And one that could genuinely change in the UK. Starmer clearly doesn't like quangos dictating policy (e.g. the Sentencing Council deciding that everybody except white men should get reduced sentences) so I can't imagine he'd be sympathetic to an employment tribunal casually bankrupting the UK's second city.
Is it true that Starmer doesn't like this sort of thing? AFAIK he only started acting tough on the sentencing council once it became an awkward political issue, and on a more abstract level he seems to believe any outcome is sacrosanct as long as it's been determined by a legal body of some description.
He seems to be opposed to excessive government getting in the way of his growth agenda/state capacity, and has told his cabinet to stop hiding behind quangos.
Of course, Labour gonna Labour, so they're still setting up new quangos and implementing new rules about diversity and stuff, so we'll see how it shakes out.
That's fair.
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