The city’s waste workers launched a 12-day strike last week in a bid to force Scottish council leaders to improve a “pessimistic” 3% pay offer, with industrial action planned to hit fringes and festivals of Edinburgh art, when visitor numbers peak in the city centre. Public sector unions held a further round of talks with the Assembly of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla), the umbrella body for the country’s 32 councils, to confirm a new 5% pay offer tabled on Monday. Strikes by waste workers are expected to spread to other areas, with nursery and school workers taking part early next month. Terry Levinthal, director of the Cockburn Association, which defends the town’s architectural heritage, told the BBC he feared the piles of rubbish and overflowing bins would cause a problem for human health – a concern supported by pest control experts. Seagulls, rats and mice were already a problem. “We’re going to see, as a result of that, that in a few weeks there’s going to be a huge expansion of the pest population because there’s so much food on offer,” Levinthal said. Kosla and city leaders are under intense pressure to resolve the dispute, with the Scottish Government, Labor and other opposition parties trading insults and blaming each other for the crisis. On Monday, Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, rejected complaints that her government could not properly fund Scottish councils, making it much more difficult for them to fund a better offer. “We have provided more resources to local authorities to try to facilitate a fairer pay deal,” he said. The Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are celebrating their 75th anniversary this year and he hoped this year’s event would mark a joyous celebration of the arts after two years of Covid lockdown. With central Edinburgh bustling with festivalgoers, tourists and residents, the strike left some pavements covered in food waste stains, with food boxes littered with overflowing bins, rubbish bags torn and leaflets and food containers filling gutters. A huge pile of bin bags and open rubbish in the Grassmarket, a tourist hotspot near the Royal Mile, provided an unexpected backdrop for a film crew and actors making a new Netflix drama series on Tuesday. Baby Reindeer is based on Richard Gadd’s 2019 stage play about a man on the fringes about his experiences of being stalked. Some fringe acts decided to help clean up the streets, sparking a row with strike supporters who said the intervention was a form of strike action. Businesses in some hotspots, including the Grassmarket and the Royal Mile, have swept and tidied up the pavements. The Edinburgh art festival found itself in this dilemma. At the weekend he tweeted a plan for artists to gather on the Royal Mile at 6pm on Wednesday and asked people to donate litter picks. The tweet was quietly deleted, without explanation. A spokesman for the festival said it now believes litter pick events would be “unbearable for the striking workers. The cost of living crisis is creating significant and very real stress for many people across the country and collectively we must ensure that the workforce is treated fairly and appropriately. We hope that a solution will be found soon.”
