By Birmingham Left Horizons supporters
The all-out strike by Birmingham City Council refuse workers has now reached a critical stage, with the right wing Labour Council – taking their instructions from a government-imposed commissioner – determined to break them.
The refuse workers had little alternative but to fight – as they say, “we are not striking for higher pay, we’re fighting to stop money being taken from us”. The City Council is attempting a pay regrading exercise, to avoid a repeat of the ‘Single Status’ equal pay scandal, that has only just been resolved.
They are trying to downgrade refuse workers’ grades, meaning, say, their union Unite, that 50 workers will lose £8,000 per annum, and 20 will lose £2,000 per annum, as well as another 80 facing general pay cuts. And all with the ever-present threat of further redundancies.
The refuse workers understand the mess Birmingham City Council is in, and – before the current dispute – had accepted £1,000 cuts in shift pay, route changes, managed increased vehicle age and failures, and reductions in night time allowances, all to save the City Council money.
Work to rule and selected strike days
But the City Council has come back for more, and a flash point was the attempt to remove the post of Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO), which was introduced to “bring significant safety expertise” to waste collection (Unite statement, 15 August 2024).
The workers began a work to rule and selected strike days, but this was escalated to all out strike action after the City Council used existing agency workers in the refuse service to break the strike.
The vitriol from some Labour councillors sounds more like an editorial in the Daily Express. They have smeared the refuse workers, accusing them of ‘violence and intimidation’ – what normal people call effective picketing. To stop or delay the agency-run bin lorries, the workers have adopted the US method of walking up and down in front of the depot gates.
The baying of some Labour councillors has been joined by the local leaders of the Liberal Democrats and the Tories, calling on the police to take ‘tougher action’ to break up the picket lines. West Midlands Police have given this call short thrift, precisely as there has been very little ‘violence’ or ‘intimidation’.
The Chief constable, Craig Guildford, said: “What I don’t want to happen is somebody to get very seriously injured or lose their life as a result of a trade dispute. The two parties need to come together and sort it out” (Birmingham Mail, April 3, 2025).
The false narrative is created by the Government and Council
The Labour government has waded in, with the local government Minister, Jim McMahon, accusing Unite of spreading “false narratives”. Yet the City Council and Government are the ones doing just that.
On the WRCOs, the City Council say the creation of the role was merely a ‘job enrichment’ tactic to resolve a dispute in the past, and that ‘no other local authorities in the country have WRCOs’. The answer to this is that they should do – nearby Coventry City Council didn’t have WRCOs, and refuse worker David Carpenter was killed in 2023 when, alone at the back of the truck, he got caught up in machinery and was crushed to death. Indeed, the HSE report that since 2020 alone, there have been at least 21 workers and eight members of the public killed in accidents involving the collection of non-hazardous waste.
The Government has tried to stand aloof from the dispute, saying it is a ‘local issue for the local council to sort out’. But Unite have reminded McMahon that Birmingham City Council is still being run by a commissioner, who is controlled by McMahon’s very own department.
The heart of the problem is that Birmingham City Council is trying to square the circle of over a decade of massive Tory cuts – Birmingham has lost over £1bn in funding since 2010 – and then successive right wing Labour Council leaderships trying to fight against the council trade unions in their ‘Single Status’ equal pay dispute, rather than work with them to resolve it. It wasted huge amounts of money hiring barristers to challenge the unions in the courts.
Council repeated warned by the unions
The trade unions had repeatedly warned the City Council they were stoking up trouble for the future by allowing discriminatory pay practices to continue. The Council should have been setting aside between £100-250mn each year from 2020, because everyone knew the law was on the side of the unions and a ‘big bill’ for an equal pay settlement was coming down the road.
Now the City Council are at last undertaking a pay re-grading process of all jobs, which needs to be completed by September, to ensure they do not breach equal pay legislation in the future. But as with the Tories, and now right wing Labour, their ‘solution’ is to create ‘equality’ by driving some wages down, rather than levelling everybody up.
Of course, they plead poverty – but the Labour City Council has not helped itself by spending £6mn each year using agency staff across all services, nor City Councillors awarding themselves an increase in allowances of 5.7%.
Thatcher’s strategy of trying to break the best-organised workers first
To push through the down-grading, the City Council have adopted the methods of Thatcher in the 1980s, albeit in microcosm – the refuse workers are the best organised and most effective, so smash the ‘big union’ first and then what chance do the less powerful workers have in education, social services, and administration of stopping the re-grading bulldozer?
The big disgrace is that hopes were high for the future of Birmingham City Council when Labour won the general election. Instead, we just got ‘business as usual’ from the Starmer government, with not even the commissioners being recalled.
The City Council is currently paying £250mn a year to pay off the ‘bail out’ loan it received from the Government when the crisis broke, most of which goes to the Treasury. All trade unionists should support Unite’s call that this debt repayment, at the very least, be restructured to provide the funds to ensure that all City Council employees receive a decent salary commensurate to their role, rather than picking on one section in a race to bottom. It is the very least that should be expected of a Labour Government.
Feature picture from the Unite website, here
