Appeal to workers and unions in region for support
No cuts – demand emergency funding from Starmer’s government
Birmingham Socialist Party members
The Birmingham bin strike is suddenly national headline news since Unite the Union members escalated their action to all-out strike.
In the face of growing pressure from residents, and press images of piles of rubbish and rats, the Labour council has declared a ‘state of emergency’.
Well, there is an emergency – but it’s not the fault of the bin workers! Birmingham City Council is making hundreds of millions of pounds of cuts and hiking council tax.
Why should workers pay for the failure of the Labour council to fight over a decade of Tory cuts? The council should stop the cuts and demand the necessary emergency funding from Starmer’s Labour government!
The council’s proposals could mean an increased police presence to try to stop effective pickets, along with using more agency staff and bin lorries from neighbouring councils to clear up fly-tipping.
If this is attempted, there should be an appeal to any such refuse workers and their respective unions to refuse to work and undermine their brothers and sisters on strike in Birmingham. This, coupled with a call to bin workers elsewhere in the region, many of whom have recently been in dispute, could stop the council’s strikebreaking plans.
Likewise, there needs to be a bold appeal to trade union branches in the region to come and join the pickets to provide strength in numbers.
In another low, the council has tried to hold a gun to striking bin workers’ heads by threatening the remaining Grade 3s with redundancy.
Even if it’s an empty threat, the fact that a Labour council could contemplate fire-and-rehire, or fire-and-replace, of these long-serving workers makes a mockery of all the claims ahead of the general election that they would bring in improvements to workers’ rights.
Labour at both local and national level is presiding over a catastrophe in local services. It’s time for all unions, starting with Unite, to have a serious discussion about how to use their political funds.
The dispute in Birmingham represents a serious attack on Unite and its militant industrial strategy by a Labour council on Starmer’s watch. As we said in last week’s edition of the Socialist, in our statement ‘Unite Executive Council: Defend militant industrial strategy and step up fight against Starmer’s austerity’, the decision of the misnamed United Left group to boycott the recent Unite Executive Council is not only unprecedented but given Starmer’s austerity offensive and the critical character of the Birmingham bin strike, it will rightly anger Unite members.
Onay Kasab, Unite negotiator, told Channel 4 news:
“We expect the government to actually acknowledge what’s going on here. We’ve got waste refuse workers looking at pay cuts of up to £8,000 a year.
“The way to get the streets cleaned up is to resolve the dispute. That means acknowledging that you can’t just cut the pay of essential public service workers by £8,000 a year.”
In response to the suggestion that there’s no money – the council is virtually ‘bankrupt’ and raising council tax by 21% – Onay said:
“We’ve got councillors who awarded themselves an increase in their allowances of 5.7%. We’ve got a council that spends over £6 million a year on agency staff in excess of the normal payroll. We’ve got commissioners – one commissioner managed to claim £18,000 for one month! And yet our members are expected to take a pay hit. We don’t want this to continue one day longer but we’ve got members telling us they can’t afford to pay their rent and mortgages.
“Our members are also residents of the city. They do not want to be out on strike. This could be over tomorrow if the council negotiates constructively and listens to our positive proposals.”
How can council cuts be ended?
Conference to debate a people’s budget for Birmingham
12 noon Saturday 26 April
Comfort Inn, Station Street, Birmingham B5 4DY
Organised by West Midlands Shop Stewards Network
