The truth about the Birmingham bin strike

The Birmingham bin strikers are the most courageous and determined fighters this country has seen for decades. For six months they have been locked in a battle to beat back a monumental attack by the Labour-led city council and the Starmer government’s commissioners. The strikers, members of Unite, have shown courage, tenacity and a level of class consciousness that we rarely see today.

The employers have tried every trick to break the strike, from coercion by police and court injunctions to scabbing, using agency workers, and bribery, tempting strikers with voluntary redundancy packages. But the strikers refuse to be coerced or bought. They have voted by 99 per cent to continue the strike, until next year if necessary.

If courage and tenacity could win this strike it would have ended in victory months ago. But their union leadership has failed to turn their determination into a winning strategy. In the beginning, when rubbish was piled high in the streets, the council was on the back foot. But soon the rubbish was being collected, the union was on the back foot and the strikers were forced into a war of attrition.

Battle lines are drawn

Birmingham City Council, under the dictatorship of government-appointed commissioners, drew up a battle plan designed to inflict a crushing defeat on the city’s working class. For their opening shot, the commissioners threw down the gauntlet to the bin workers. They targeted a job category that was created when the union won the 2017 bin strike. The commissioners decreed that this job grade would be abolished, slashing the pay of some 150 bin workers by up to £8k a year.

The bin workers rose to the challenge and fought back. They began a series of strikes in January and escalated to an all-out strike on 11 March. By the end of that month, with rubbish mounting high, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner sent military advisers to the city to help put the commissioners on a war footing. The employers put their battle plan into full swing with a massive scabbing operation, hiring agency workers to operate refuse trucks, using court injunctions to make picketing ineffective and bringing in scabs from neighbouring councils.

The union, on the other hand, went into the strike with no battle plan. According to some strikers, the union had an inkling from late last year that an attack was coming down the pipeline, but union officials said there was nothing to worry about. By mid-April, when the commissioners had the upper hand, Unite leader Sharon Graham and national lead officer Onay Kasab put an offer from the council to the strikers. Some say it was as bad or even worse than the original offer that sparked the strike. Workers voted it down by 97 per cent!

The battle is joined

All the union bureaucrats did was plead for negotiations, hoping that they could go back to the membership with a revised offer. Unite’s leaders kept up a toothless appeal to the toothless council, with a ridiculous “where’s Cotton?” campaign. It was delusional to think that John Cotton, the council leader, was calling the shots. Kasab and Graham knew as well as anyone that the battle was with the government’s commissioners, not the council, yet they entertained this fiction among strikers. The commissioners were appointed for a purpose—to squeeze every drop of blood out of the working population of the city. They have fleeced working people by jacking up the council tax, gutting social services and slashing hundreds of council jobs. In the bin strike, they ripped up the usual rule book in which the employers throw a bone to the bureaucrats who sell it to their members. The commissioners are absolutely not interested in a compromise; for their part the strikers are not willing to give up. They are too far in and have sacrificed too much. Caught between these two determined forces, the union leadership has no cards to play.

Frustration on the picket lines

Strikers have been fighting every way they can to stop scab refuse wagons, despite court injunctions and their picket lines being crossed on a daily basis by agency workers. On the picket lines, militant strikers freely vent their anger and frustration against the impotence of the union leadership. Early in the strike, pickets were defiant and would openly criticise the union leaders as “weak” and “not up to the job”. Again and again, strikers angrily said that the union should “pull the plug on the funding” of Labour. Needless to say, strikers expressed contempt for Labour, often in colourful terms: “We live in a uni-party state” and the political parties are just “two cheeks of the same arse”.

The strikers remained steady, the union leaders dithered, but the commissioners ramped up the attack. They declared that the same savage pay cut of £8k imposed on 150 loaders would be extended to 200 drivers as well. The drivers joined the strike, giving it a shot in the arm and boosting morale on the picket lines. The strikers kept finding new ways to hamper the scab refuse operation, including by slow-walking wagons leaving the depots and moving picket lines to where the court injunctions did not apply. The strikers’ tenacity and ability to disrupt rubbish collection infuriated the employers. In July they upped the ante once again, declaring that all bin workers must accept the new conditions, including the massive pay cuts, or they’re out of a job.

This provocation infuriated the union leaders who heard about it during a Unite conference in Brighton. The union made the headlines by suspending deputy prime minister Angela Rayner from the union and making noises about cutting off the funds to Labour. This move, and an angry speech by Sharon Graham against Rayner, briefly lifted the mood on the picket line. It seemed like the first time strikers had a good word to say about Graham. But after the grandstanding was done and dusted and nothing happened, any illusion that the Unite leadership might grow a backbone and make a push on behalf of the strikers was short-lived.

Our leaflets (one of which is printed in this issue) urged strikers to win agency workers to the strike, approach other unions to ballot their members for strike action, pull the plug on funds to Labour and turn this into a city-wide fight against the commissioners. Above all, we called on union members to take the running of the strike into their own hands. On one occasion, when a small group of strikers read our leaflet and talked to our comrades, one of them asked: are you saying that we have to not only fight the council and the commissioners, but our own union leaders as well? Yes indeed.

Many strikers agreed that the demands we raise are in fact what’s needed, but found it hard to see themselves stepping up to the task of leading the strike. They are sceptical about the prospect of winning support from the rest of the labour movement, given the state it’s in today. However, as the strike dragged on, with no end in sight the mood of the strikers became downbeat. The shift in their outlook can be measured by the difference in their attitudes to the two “megapickets”. The first megapicket in May was seen by strikers as a nice gesture, but useless in helping them to win the strike. By July the pickets were so completely boxed-in by injunctions that the megapicket, which managed to stop some wagons, was seen as their only way of stopping wagons. When Corbyn showed up, to the delight of the left, most strikers listened politely to his speech although they view him as part of the political establishment that has driven the working class into the ground.

The left and the strike

The left has only played a walk-on part in this drama. Of course, every group abstractly called (on who?) for solidarity with the strikers. But these calls were utterly meaningless coming as they did from left groups who support the leaders of Unite, who are the biggest obstacle to escalating the strike! The Socialist Party is a prime example, writing that “Unite should initiate a ‘council of war’ with the other council unions in Birmingham, including Unison” (socialistparty.org.uk, 23 July). How about the bin strikers initiating a council of war against the SP’s beloved bureaucrat Onay Kasab, Sharon Graham and all their socialist cheerleaders! The left’s actual contribution to the Birmingham bin strike is to cover for the bureaucracy, painting a rosy picture as if the strike is winning and hiding the truth from themselves and everyone else in their bubble.

The ending to the story of the Birmingham bin strike has yet to be written. If it wins, it could begin to turn the tide in favour of the working class, in Birmingham and the rest of the country. If they lose, it will deepen the disillusionment among workers in the organisations of the working class and strengthen Farage who many strikers already look to. Even at this late stage, it is possible to turn the tables in favour of the strikers. The tactics needed are obvious enough. It’s a matter of choosing a leadership that will fight to win and persuading those who are not up for such a fight to step aside. There’s no guarantee of victory, but strikers who’ve fought so hard and given so much deserve better.