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What do delivery men, generic white van drivers and most bin men have in common?

All the employees doing these jobs can end up earning as little as £4 an hour.

How does that work?

Well, all are on short term or zero hours contracts; all of them are either minimum wage or close to it and all of them have a limited amount of time to perform their tasks or they are penalised. Yes, you read that correctly; if bin men don't collect the right amount of bins in a day - regardless of conditions - they have to continue working - for no pay - until the job is done. If one of those delivery drivers who have to do as many as 180 drops in a day don't finish they have to finish meaning the money they are paid could be slashed in half - and if they have to pay their own fuel charges, some might work for as little as £2 an hour.

So if you get annoyed about ungracious bin men, or the twat in the white van narrowly missing a group of schoolkids because he's speeding down a residential road, you now know why.

More importantly, we have to put to one side the prejudices we are now seeing and feeling every day and remember it's the employers who are making people slapdash, inconsiderate or dangerous, not the people who do the job and at some point someone is going to kill some kids or plough into a nursery and other people - say the government - are going to have to look at the causes of it rather than just blaming a fatigued worker or whatever circumstances brought them to where they endangered people.

Yet everything has to bow down to them forces of commerce. The government can bleat all they want about drones almost hitting jet planes, but there's no one in the Tory party standing up suggesting the things should be banned; I mean, companies make money from these things. The government wouldn't ban fireworks because despite the damage and injury they cause, it would be prohibitive for business. I wonder how long before morally reprehensible things start going on sale or allowing general access to, because, you know, legitimate people can make money from these things...

Northampton Borough Council tied themselves into a deal with a waste disposal company - allegedly there were links between the company and a couple of Tory councillors - who couldn't deliver, so not only were the company not punished for negating on the deal, they were allowed to renegotiate the deal with scant regard for its own workers - ending up with bin men on zero hours, minimum wage, running along the road because they can't even take a break without losing money. Now you might think this is okay and the council are probably only employing the feckless and foreign, but what is being proposed, so that council tax bills are not increased, is that gangs of local residents clean up the streets after the bin men, because there isn't enough money to send refuse workers to clean up the mess left, because they have to move so fast they can't go back and pick up rubbish they have dropped.

Street light and bins are the two most visible items you pay your council tax for yet both have been made into semi-commercial concerns with the expectation to join the Big Society and do your bit. 52% of your council tax now goes on administration, including paying twats to come up with ideas to make you end up paying more, whether fiscally or with your free time. NBC recently laid off workers involved in anti-social behaviour, helping tenants in their homes and general support work; the man who it appears is paid purely to see what can be cut from the budget is paid £105,000 a year.

Just think about that next time you see litter on the streets, and the expectation is that you pick it up.