Workers at household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) in Sheffield are to go on strike again this weekend amidst anger at council budget cuts that have seen a 50 per cent drop in opening hours and reduced working hours.

Workers have been on rolling strikes since May, when Sheffield City Council revealed changes to opening times in an effort to save £500,000 from the budget. A suspension notice of strike action will expire today (31 August) and workers, represented by the union GMB, will go on strike this Saturday, over complaints that the cuts in hours “will not deliver a service that is fit and safe for purpose for the people of Sheffield”.

Blackstock Road HWRC in Gleadless and Manchester Road HWRC in Deepcar will both be closed on Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 September, but residents can still take their recycling to the centres at Longley Avenue West in Shirecliffe, Beighton Road in Woodhouse, and Greaves Lane in High Green between the hours of 10am and 6pm.

Peter Davies, GMB Regional Officer, announced the new strikes, saying: “The 50 per cent budget cut for the recycling centres leading to dramatic drop in opening hours and less hours for staff is not acceptable to our members and will not deliver a service that is fit and safe for purpose for the people of Sheffield.

“The workforce returned to work after 28 days of strike action but talks to resolve the dispute have not proven fruitful. The suspension notice for strike action runs out on Friday (31 August) so GMB have served notice that we intend to call weekend strikes from this coming weekend.”

Davies went on to say that he is now looking to meet with Sheffield City Council's Cabinet Member for Environment, Waste and Streetscene, Councillor Jack Scott, to try to “seek a resolution”.

Household waste in Sheffield is currently handled by waste management company, Veolia (which has seen a 10 per cent cut in their general waste budget), but the household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) are handled by charity, Sova Recycling, as part of a sub-contract. According to Davies, the cuts will exacerbate the area’s waste problems, which have been under mounting pressure due to “fortnightly collections and the scrapping of green waste in Sheffield”.

Davies also accounts the reduction in opening hours and working hours as responsible for the increasing queues seen at local HWRCs. “Regardless of strike action or not, we are seeing massive queues at the recycle centres. Queues, I should add that are resulting in heavy articulated wagons shuffling their skips around on the main roads whilst pedestrians walk by, queues that are causing massive congestion at Beighton and elsewhere and queues that could, quite frankly, result in serious incidents affecting the public and the workforce alike.”

Councillor Jack Scott has said that contingency plans to provide recycling services to Sheffield residents will be announced next week. “We have made a number of improvements to the service over the last few months that we thought would help to resolve this problem. However, the basic problem is that Sheffield is facing massive government cuts.

“Of course, if there was an alternative to making this cut, we would take it, but the reality is that this is the consequence of such massive cuts… We will put in place contingency plans to provide a service to the people of Sheffield similar to those used during the previous strike… I am very sorry for the inconvenience that this strike may cause.”

The ‘improvements to the service’ made in recent months include:

• Delaying implementation of opening hours from January to April to give GMB and Sova ‘time to develop options for finding cost savings’
• Extending redundancy pay to all operatives
• Reintroducing summer and winter opening hours
• Protecting hourly pay until December 2012 for foremen that became operative due to ‘reduce management requirement’
• Removing any compulsory redundancies with the HWRCs