Garbage men will go on strike during the Fringe Festival

If you’re heading to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer, you might have to be prepared for it to smell a bit, as the Scottish capital’s garbage collectors have planned a city-wide strike for the duration of the big event.

This week, workers in Scotland’s waste and recycling industry voted to take industrial action over a pay dispute, with unions GMB and Unite saying the offer from government organisation COSLA was significantly lower than what they were entitled to.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. During the 2022 Fringe Festival, there was a huge backlog of uncollected rubbish across Edinburgh when refuse workers went on strike for 12 days.

This year’s festival will take place from August 2 to 26. Waste and recycling workers will take to the streets alongside their colleagues in Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen. Brian Robertson, Unites branch secretary for Edinburgh, told the BBC: “We don’t want that. We don’t want to mess up the festival – we messed it up two years ago.”

However, he added that the measure was “absolutely necessary” in response to COSLA’s offer unless the Scottish Government altered it. He said: “We want the Scottish Government to come to the negotiating table before we have to do anything.”

“The vast majority of local authority employees earn far less than the average wage in this city – many of them work for less than £20,000 a year.”

A COSLA spokesman said: “We are disappointed with our unions’ consideration of industrial action and concerned that it appears to be targeting waste disposal, again posing potential health risks to the public.”

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