Thank you for your interest in this story
To continue reading this article, subscribe to the Stray Ferret for as little as £1 a week
Already a subscriber? Log in here.
03
Feb
Harrogate bin worker says proposed four day week will damage family life
A refuse worker in Harrogate has criticised a proposed four-day working week saying it will damage his family life.
The council has put forward a plan to increase the hours of refuse workers across four days and take Mondays off.
The regular working day of 7am-3pm will change to 6am-4pm from Tuesday to Friday from April 21.
The worker, who has asked to stay anonymous, told the Stray Ferret that the plan will heavily impact his family life:
I have children to pick up from school. At the moment, I can pick them up because I finish at 2:30pm. Once the new plans come in, I won’t be finishing until 4:15pm.
My children need to be picked up from school at just past three so that eliminates my ability to be able to do that.
With the new working hours, I have to be in work for 6:15am. I have a 30-minute walk to work, so I am up every morning at 4:30am.
I am in bed by 8:30pm. Because of this I’m barely getting to see my family.
The worker said that, whilst his partner can pick their children up, it causes additional stress on the family.
The worker’s partner told the Stray Ferret:
I have built our lives around our working hours, after 10 years of knowing his rounds and his general home times.
When my husband started at 7am, he could briefly help with getting our children ready until I took over.
His new start time makes this unreasonable to do, so I am completely on my own doing mornings. Whereas previously he would finish work in time to pick up our daughter from school, support me in the evenings, and be up until after the kids went to bed, I will now be doing all that as well.
Getting one day in the "work week" when he is at home does not make up for basically being a single parent for the other four.
By reducing collections to four week days, the council is aiming to avoid the additonal cost of Monday Bank Holidays.
Everytime there is a Bank Holiday it current has to extend the collection days to a Saturday when it has to pay workers time and a half.
By reducing to a four day week and avoiding any collection on a Saturday it can save these overtime payments.
The worker argued that whilst this will save the council money, the changes could be more costly for single parents:
There are single parents that work with us. They will now have no choice but to enrol their kids into after school clubs or childcare because they can’t pick them up on time. This will cost them money that they wouldn’t previously have had to spend.
The worker is not currently part of the union UNISON but said he soon will be:
There is about a 50/50 split of workers who are part of the union. The union representative has recently retired, and we are unsure who is the new representative currently, or if there is one.
The union have been struggling to make any progress for us anyway. It struggled to get our pay rises backdated and was only slightly successful after months of negotiations.
North Yorkshire Council has issued a statement defending the changes:
We have consulted our 500 staff about these changes, with the vast majority being supportive and raising very few concerns. Where there were concerns, these were addressed and staff supported through the consultation period.
We also actively engaged with the union to help ensure we fully understand the individual impact of the proposal.
In doing so, it provides greater resilience as it allows us to utilise staff and vehicles in other areas during times of demand, should we need to.
As most bank holidays fall on a Monday, it also provides more consistency for residents and our staff, and there should be no need to carry out weekend work. This means that our staff will have a three-day break consistently throughout the year.
By having a working day with fewer vehicles on the road, we can carry out any maintenance on this day, should that be required.
However, we appreciate this change may impact some and we are more than happy to work with staff to explore alternative roles within the service, should they wish to do so.
The council emphasised that four of the seven former local authorities across North Yorkshire currently operate a four-day working week.
0