By Birmingham Left Horizons supporters
The bin workers in Birmingham are now entering their sixth month of strike action. It is an outrage that all this is being overseen by not only a Labour council, but behind them a Labour government: they now control the Commissioners originally sent in by the Tories. For Starmer and co, it is merely Tory business as usual.
The dispute is over Birmingham City Council’s attempt to make substantial cuts to the bin workers’ pay, some facing losses of up to £8,000 a year.
It is part of Birmingham City Council’s regrading of the pay structure, to prevent further claims under the Equal Pay settlement.
This fight is about the driving down of wages
But the City Council are trying to achieve this by driving existing wages down, rather than levelling up those on lower pay. As the former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn said when he joined a demonstration in support of the strikers in July: “You don’t achieve equal pay by driving down the wages of male workers.”
The strike action had been effective through the tactic of ‘walking the wagons’, but they are now banned from this after the City Council brought out an Injunction, and strikers can now be arrested if they cross barriers erected around the picket line.
Throughout the strike, despite subsistence from the union’s benevolent fund, strikers are still losing around £400-500 a month.
The strike continues
The dispute has dragged on because their union, Unite, is facing a ‘three way negotiation’ – first with the City Council who then take proposals to the government imposed Commissioners running the city, who then reject proposed settlements.
Many in the Birmingham branches of the Labour Party naively thought that the new Labour government would remove the Commissioners, particularly after it was discovered that the current bill to settle the Equal Pay claims will be £250 million, not the £750 million claimed by the Tories.
The employers are ‘digging in’
Yet not only are they digging in, both Commissioners, City Council and Labour Government are enacting what can only be described as ‘P&O in slow motion’. They are now saying negotiations have ended, and the bin workers will have to accept the lower pay or face redundancy.
If you need evidence of their belligerence, you just need to note that this dispute is costing the cash-strapped City Council more money than if they settled the dispute and returned to normal service.
The dispute is costing the City Council millions, which could be used instead to settle pay claims or reduce the current round of cutbacks to council services:
- Birmingham City Council has repaid £2 million to residents who signed up for the garden recycling scheme.
- at the start of the dispute, only 10 per cent of the refuse workforce were agency workers: that figures is now 55 per cent, as well as the City Council paying neighbouring local authorities who are ‘loaning’ refuse staff.
- Birmingham City Council will face huge fines for failing to provide a recycling service.
The bin workers must win – if they are beaten, you can be sure the City Council, at the behest of the government imposed Commissioners, will be looking at the pay grade structure of all Birmingham City Council employees to see where they can make cuts, and all will be facing a ‘race to the bottom’.
The featured image at the top of the article shows the picket line on 25 July with Jeremy Corbyn speaking.
