Alistair Tice, Sheffield Socialist Party
The strike by Veolia bin workers in Sheffield, members of Unite, fighting for union recognition, is now entering its tenth month.
Resolve remains firm among the strikers, whose morale has been boosted by a recent solidarity visit by French CGT trade unionists and striking Birmingham bin workers.
That was followed by a visit to the Lumley Street depot picket by Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham, who promised an escalation of action both in Sheffield and internationally.
Since then, the leverage campaign targeting Veolia’s multinational headquarters in Paris has been stepped up, with huge visual displays on prestigious buildings demanding, in French, “Veolia: Clean up your act!” At the same time, the publicity campaign in Sheffield has been ramped up.
Most effective has been a bit of France or Birmingham coming to Sheffield on the picket line. Pickets, wearing Veolia CEO masks, have started ‘slow walking’ in front of the depot gates, preventing the bin wagons from leaving on several mornings, delaying and disrupting refuse collection by several hours. The first time resulted in 7,000 bins being ‘dropped’ that day, meaning not collected.
The police presence has increased, and ‘Veolia – Private Property’ signs have gone up, with a white line painted across the depot entrance to define their private property. But so far the disruption has continued, putting more pressure on Veolia and the council to resolve this dispute.
The ‘Private Property’ sign should say ‘Privatised Property’ because the council’s waste management contract was outsourced to Veolia in 2001 and runs till 2038! The Socialist Party, whose members have supported the strike from day one, believes that bringing the waste contract back in-house should be a key demand of a people’s budget to be campaigned for by Sheffield Trades Council.
