They really should have pursued th equal pay case all the way to the supreme court, total joke (and borderline commie nonsense) that some completely different jobs are considered "equivalent" or that it's discrimination to pay different rates for them.
It doesn't matter if something requires the same education level (or lack of) some jobs are going to face differing levels of applications, and differing employment markets and need to be able to adjust to reflect that, one size fits all doesn't make any sense if you're comparing refuse collectors with caterers, especially if you're also dealing with industrial action say on the part of the refuse collectors. Ditto to other farcical stuff like warehouse workers and shelf stackers or till workers in supermarkets... if someone wants the higher paid warehouse work then they should go and work in the warehouse!
Defined benefit pensions were a very bad idea and cause a huge liability. It's worse in the US where there's less central government involvement, local governments are more reliant on funding from their local taxation... so you have a city like Detroit where a load of the population moves out but the returned public sector workers, police officers etc.. that used to serve a more productive, larger population still need to be paid for by the current, economically deprive population.
Not an issue if your pension payments actually went into a pot and you were paid based on your contributions and investment performance... but with defined benefit it's just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Anyway, on the topic of Birmingham:
