Bromley’s traffic wardens are out on strike today and tomorrow, and will be marching on Bromley’s civic centre tomorrow in protest at a derisory offer from their employers to improve what they call their “poverty pay”.
Strike action: the traffic wardens in Bromley have been working to rule for a fortnight
The traffic wardens are members of the GMB union, and are employees of APCOA Parking, who have the outsourced contract from the council for parking enforcement in the borough.
Traffic wardens in Bromley are paid £12.21 an hour. APCOA want to pay their employees in Bromley just £13 per hour. APCOA staff doing similar work in Lambeth and Wandsworth are paid £15 per hour. The London Living Wage is set at £13.85 per hour.
Bromley’s traffic wardens have been working to rule for a fortnight. The 48-hour strike is their first where they have withdrawn their labour, after they rejected overwhelmingly the employer’s last-ditch offer.
Craig Prickett, the GMB’s regional organiser, said: “GMB members deliver an essential public service for Bromley but are being paid poverty wages by a hugely profitable, multinational company.
“This offer is nowhere near good enough.
“If APCOA will not pay these workers fairly, Bromley Council should be looking at taking this contract back in-house so the community gets the reliable, fairly-paid service it deserves.
“Our door remains open for when APCOA want to return to talks to table a sensible offer that would see our members properly paid for the jobs that they do.”
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The £12.21 an hour paid to traffic wardens in Bromley is the government-set legal minimum for people aged 21 and above; APCOA couldn’t pay any less, unless they wanted to get busted.
Every year, campaign group The Living Wage Foundation calculates the hourly wage rate that workers really need for an acceptable standard of living. For the UK that has just been recalculated to be £13.45. For London it’s now £14.80.
APCOA can afford it. Their UK operating profit for 2024 was £5.7m, up over 35% from 2023