So... inspired by the worst facebook group in the world, let's talk about "dustmen" back in the day and, specifically, the 1969 Dustmen Strike https://twitter.com/gdimelow/status/1300901493869031425

1969 saw a long-running dispute involving dustmen (as they were known then), with the first walkouts in Lambeth in February and no settlement until October

The issue? What was colloquially known as "totting", the custom that refuse workers had the right to sell things they salvaged from the rubbish.

Prior to '69, selling things they found in your rubbish was semi-officially part of bin workers' compensation, which might explain some of the mythology around them being so keen to dive into your back garden to get your bins.

But in 1969, we're right at the heart of where Britain's first big crisis of confidence about "productivity", fears that the country is getting over-taken by competitor nations with their more genuine "modernity".

Having your wages determined by custom? By what bits of metal happen to show up in your bins? That ain't a rational way to determine anything!

So, local authorities were encouraged to buy out "totting" with "productivity agreements", with better basic pay in exchange for the end of selling scrap. But, as ever, they didn't offer enough money to make it stick.

(Check the dig at Labour's Minister for Employment & Productivity, Barbara Castle, on the placard. Castle was at the forefront of promoting productivity agreements, as well as the unpopular industrial relations reform programme - In Place of Strife)

Like most strikes in the late '60s, it starts small and is a wildcat strike (ie. the leaders of their union didn't approve). So to begin with it's 230 dustmen in Lambeth. One local councillor calls them "thugs and gangsters as seen in Chicago in the 1930s"

(That Trans-Atlantic association between sanitation workers and the mafia predates Tony)

The Councillor accused the workers of sabotaging council vehicles and threatening local councillors.

The bargaining is local, but the issue of replacing totting with productivity agreements is nationwide, so the union reps for the Lambeth workers, organise a London-wide reps meeting, generating "sympathy strikes" and similar disputes in other boroughs

The strike got escalated in other ways too, to begin with the workers had done voluntary collections for Lambeth hospitals, out of goodwill. That stopped when the insults started: "We regret having to stop the service regret being called gangsters"

The Lambeth workers settled in February. But, the strike came back in September, when Hackney had the same dispute, then it spread to 16 more areas in October. Then to 30 out of 32 boroughs. All unofficial wildcat strikes.

Then it began to spread to other local authority manual workers. The dustmen decided to demand £20 a week minimum for everyone, not just themselves!

but by the end of the month, the workers are running out of money. The strike ends with an unsatisfactory raise of £2 10s (still a ~15% raise mind). More disputes keep popping up though, Kensington & Chelsea has a big one in 1970 and the council uses school kids as strikebreakers

One of the interesting things about the 1969-70 strikes is how little play they have in popular memory in comparison to another rubbish strike in 1979.

The piles of rubbish in Leicester Square are part of our political folklore. REMEMBER THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT

The 1960s and 1970s occupy this weird zone in national nostalgia, where they're both part of the "good old days" and the epitome of the "bad old days" that the modern world rescued us from at the same time.

Which is why these bizarro nostalgia memories never treat "back in the day" as being populated by people, real people who exercised collective agency, who got angry about their working conditions and pay, who felt under-appreciated, abused and complained about it, fought over it.

This allows "no health and safety in those days" man to somehow occupy the same time and space as "went on strike at the drop of a hat" man. The two sets of memories are sectioned off from each other.

but, as much as either existed, they were, ultimately, the same people