Nick Hart, Birmingham Socialist Party
Birmingham City Council, with Starmer’s Labour government’s public backing, is pulling out all the stops to try and break the spirit of striking bin workers.
A few days after the council declared a ‘state of emergency’, Unite members arriving to picket their depots were greeted by up to 20 police officers and rows of fences. These were in place to stop bin workers using the successful ‘go slow’ tactics of delaying the wagons from leaving the yard for hours at a time.
Workers were threatened with arrest under Section 14 of the Public Order Act. This is clearly a sign of the council panicking at weeks of missed collections, with rubbish piling up in many areas and mile-long queues of residents at mobile tips.
Even if the council can get agency workers out to collect rubbish with help from their ‘hired security’ (aka West Midlands Police), it will take more than a few days to clear the backlog, and at a great financial cost.
This is clearly a crunch point of the dispute. The Labour council, with Starmer behind it, is threatening to crush the strike and inflict a defeat on Unite by brutal strikebreaking measures, such as using wagons from neighbouring councils.
The whole union movement must now come to Unite’s aid with support and solidarity.
It is welcome that the Fire Brigades Union has publicly pledged that none of its members will clear rubbish, rejecting the call to do so from a Lib Dem councillor.
It is essential that council unions Unison and the GMB make a similar commitment, explaining to their members that a defeat for Birmingham bin workers would open the door to the same attacks on them.
Unite should use this time to apply maximum pressure on the councillors responsible, and on the government. It’s welcome that the union’s general secretary Sharon Graham has publicly called out the role of Angela Rayner and other ministers in allowing, or more likely encouraging, the council’s strikebreaking tactics.
But the government needs to understand that, if it does not intervene to insist that the binworkers’ demands are met, it will be taking on the might of Unite and the whole trade union movement.
At a rally on 8 April outside the council meeting, bin workers remained defiant. Workers can see that this is not just a fight to stop pay cuts to Grade 3 workers but to stop the council smashing the union and further downgrading the workforce.
If the council is going to try and stop effective picketing, then even more political pressure needs to be applied, including a suspension of Unite funding for Labour while a discussion is started about how to use the union’s political fund.
