In 1900, the Labour Representation Committee was formed. It aimed to promote the interests of the trade unions and labour within government, and six years later it led to the formation of the Labour Party. This represented a class break from the previous strategy of trying to influence the Liberals.

A century and a quarter later, Birmingham Labour Council, with full support from the national Labour Party, has modified this strategy. It now sees a trades union’s job – Unite in this case – as accepting the interests of the Labour council within the workplace.

Starmer has reflected what Preet Kaur Gill, Labour MP for Edgbaston, has been saying. She has been all overbroadcast and electronic media arguing that a small number of bin workers are holding the residents of Birmingham to ransom.

Following on from previous attack on the bin workers in 2017, which was substantially pushed back, accoding to Unite there is currently a plan to “remove the role of Waste Recycling Officer from its collection operation. If this happens then the safety of bin workers and the public will be compromised.”

“If the council succeeds in pushing through these cynical and dangerous cuts, then scores of workers will also see their pay cut by a staggering £8000 per annum which will seriously undermine their standard of living”.

The council disputes these facts of course and has linked the dispute to the very long running equal pay saga within the council, which the union refutes. The council also has plans for a big remodelling of the refuse collection service.

Whatever one thinks about whether changes are need they should not be done at the expense of the bin workers. Indeed, it could represent an opportunity to improve the working conditions for those who do this difficult and essential job. However, after many negotiations, the union felt that ‘the council had shown no interest in the welfare and wellbeing of its workforce’.

All-out strike and council threats

Unite members escalated their action from partial strikes to an all-out dispute on 11 March. This led to predictable scenes of overflowing rubbish that we have seen on our TV screens. Once again, all too predictably, the council brought in agency workers to help break the strike.

In turn this led to Unite members trying to block the agency bin lorries leaving the depot, and consequent smear stories about union intimidation. Some Labour government ministers, and local Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors have asked for the police to suppress the legal use of slow walking to delay the use of agency staff.

The situation has escalated, with claims of post code collections by agency workers, pictures of rats and stories of huge smells and allegations that people were dumping their rubbish in Small Heath, a largely British-Asian area. The Labour council has increased its attack on the bin workers by threatening compulsory redundancies. What an irony given the way Neil Kinnock lambasted left – wing Liverpool council for issuing redundancy notices to its workers in 1985? Meawhile Birmingham City Council is continuing to charge for vermin clearance despite the ongoing bin strikes.

Austerity and resistance

There are apparently three certainties in life, death, taxes and local government cuts. The latter has especially been the case since the Tory – Lib Dem government introduced austerity in 2010. Labour has been in power in the city since 2012 and has duly implemented the required attacks on services and jobs. This must be borne in mind when discussing this strike

Such has been the scale of the cuts that the council gave up on the unequal struggle of balancing the books last yeae and issued a section 114 notice., Commissioners were subsequently sent in to do a hatchet job on the city’s already very damaged services.

To what extent the commissioners are driving the assault on the refuse workers, and to what extent is it the council leadership? To the bin workers it hardly matters of course,. It would have been nice to see a bit of a rebellion by left Labour councillors and a rallying to their cause. But only one Labour councillor, Sam Forsyth (Quinton), voted against this year’s cuts budget of £148m (over the rat tax issue) and one, Martin Brooks (Harborne), who angrily resigned from the party and is now sitting as an independent.

Meanwhile, a previous leader of the council, John Clancy, together with a local academic, has claimed that the council has made huge overpayments to the West Midlands Pension Fund over years, without which many of the cuts would not have been necessary, even for pro-austerity councillors. ACR members have been active in helping raise this issue and demanding an immediate re-certifying of the contributions this year, and a rebate. This has been refused.

With local elections for all 101 city councillors due in May 2026, one wonders which textbook on how to auto-destruct a Labour council they have been reading?

Meanwhile the bin strike carries on. The rubbish piles, health hazards, smells, rats and public anger are all still rising, but the strike is still solid. The danger is, however, that leading politicians or state actors intervene on the side of the council and try to smash the union’s campaign. Even UNITE’s General Secretary, Sharon Graham, is being disregarded. There have been calls to bring in the army as strike breakers.

All Local Government authorities in Englabd are watching this strike. All their employees could face pay cuts or redundancy. The local state has tried to keep it local, but if these environmental workers are defeated it will have a knock-on effect. We should demand a national mobilization now, led by UNITE, but encouraging support from other local government workers in particular, but all trade unionists beyond that.

Active solidarity from the trade union movement and local campaigners is necessary, but with Reform UK having a close eye on the city’s local elections next year, the question of political support for such trade unionists in struggle is also posed. It is good that the Green Party voted against this year’s cuts budget, but we need a much stronger political presence on the picket lines, in the media and at the ballot box as well.

It is disappointing that the councillor in charge of refuse collection, Majid Mahmood (Bromford and Hodge Hill), who supported the strike in 2017, has reportedly resigned his membership of Unite Where is the necessary political support going to come from in future? Who will represent the interests of trades unionists at governmental level now, as was originally envisaged back in 1900 with the LRC?