Coventry Socialist Party
The long-running bin drivers’ dispute in Coventry has a stark warning for local authority workers across the country.
Like P&O, Coventry’s ‘Labour’ Council has attacked its workers who are struggling for a living wage. All that’s missing are the black masks and sets of handcuffs!
The council has organised an ‘alternative workforce’ to try and break the strike, using an arms-length company to do so, something other local authorities will be eager to exploit if Coventry Council gets away with it. It has suspended a senior union rep in a blatant act of trade union victimisation, and even talked in the media about derecognising Unite the Union.
This is nothing other than attempted union busting by trying to do to the drivers what they intend to do to all the workers. They want to defeat a well-organised section of workers as an example to all. The council has actually said it wouldn’t pay the drivers because then it would have to pay other workers.
That is why this is a dispute for all workers, and why a victory for the drivers will be a victory for all.
Farcically, the council has spent around £3 million fighting the drivers, when just £300,000 would settle the dispute. This from a council which has the money to pay off one former senior officer with a package of around half a million pounds!
More and more workers are organising to fight to defend their living standards in this cost-of-living crisis. And the bosses are launching a counteroffensive and trying to get their retaliation in first.
This attack, and all the others, must be met by the full force of the trade union movement mobilising to defend its members’ living standards, jobs and rights at work. We say to Coventry Council: reinstate Pete Randle and pay up!
Several Coventry HGV drivers have joined the Socialist Party – why don’t you join too?
