By Niall Dooris
Birmingham city Council bin workers, represented by Unite the Union, have been on indefinite strike action since the 11 March. This is in response to a pay cut of £8,000 a year to around 170 bin workers. It was an attempt from the council to make the workers’ pay for a crisis of its own making.
The Labour led Birmingham City Council is in over £3 Billion of debt. This is largely due to criminally underpaying women workers in the council for decades and huge overspending on an IT Project that was messed up by a private firm, after making a nice profit. This all occurred in the context of 14 years of Tory austerity which decimated public services and council budgets even further.
The convenient solution of the council was not to make its workers pay. Additionally, Starmer’s Labour Government raised Council Tax again, just like the Tories, on the residents of the city. Labour has already shown that they are no meaningful departure from the Tories when it comes to making the working class and the vulnerable pay for the crisis of capital- ism, for example recently cutting disability benefits to pay for arms spending.
Austerity is a choice and one they are making willingly. UK Billionaire wealth grows by £35 Million every day, why don’t they ever have to pay? This would be the popular alternative to this choice, but you won’t see it offered by the politicians or the media. This is unlikely to change so the working class must lead the way itself with its most powerful tool, the strike.
National trade union support
Hopefully, The Birmingham Bin Strike will win its workers a fair deal. That requires, the struggle being taken up by the whole trade union movement, as we are beginning to see with the firefighter union calling on members not to be used as scabs and mass pickets. It also means fighting a battle to win broader support against back drop of massive propaganda including by demanding that Council debt is written off. Finally, it means ending the ridiculous situation of a union funding councillors who break strikes – that means cutting unions funding of Labour, not just in Birmingham but nationally, and support the building of a left alternative to Labour.
Powerful example
Either way it should be a powerful example to workers elsewhere in the UK and Ireland that austerity can and- should be resisted. Further attacks on workers and our public services seem inevitable at this point, where possible this should be met with determined strike action by the unions. The images of the rubbish filled streets of Birmingham is a small display of the power that workers have in society, we can see who is important in society, the workers not the wealthy.
University and College Union (UCU) is to begin a process of sustained industrial action on the 10th October in defense of USS pensions.
