The Birmingham Bin Strike

Since the turn of the year, the brave bin workers of Birmingham have put up fierce resistance to obscene attacks on their wages and working conditions by Birmingham City Council. The bin workers, surviving only on strike pay, stand united and, unfortunately, virtually alone against this vicious and premeditated attack by the Labour-controlled council.

Birmingham City Council, which is officially bankrupt, is spending huge amounts of council tax-payers’ money on breaking this strike. They are paying enormous fees to private waste management contractors to remove rubbish and prevent local residents from fighting in the streets just to have their household refuse taken away. 

The council is also wasting yet more money that it doesn’t have scurrying off to courts to legally prevent strikers from blocking waste vehicles on picket lines, while the cost of the eventual and inevitable clean-up of the mess left by this bitter dispute will be absolutely enormous. A council which is pleading penury simply can’t afford these sort of actions – which suggests that their actions are clearly being supported, both morally and financially, by the government itself.

The bin workers’ struggle is key for both ruling class and working class alike. For years, dozens of councils across the nation have been forced into serious financial distress by attacks from all sides – swingeing austerity, caps in increases to Council Tax and increasing burdens on existing budgets faced with unprecedented amounts of homelessness and destitution, as well as the profligacy of the councils themselves, who have gambled huge amounts of money on doomed-to-fail schemes like energy companies and solar farms.

Councils who declare bankruptcy are forced to call in government-appointed ‘commissioners’ to clear up their financial messes. These commissioners impose cost-cutting, mass privatisation and wage suppression across the piece in order to ‘balance the books’. Key public assets are lost to greedy privateers forever, while workers are fired and rehired on far worse wages and conditions than they had won and earned previously.

Why is the government is so willing to underwrite such huge losses in Birmingham? It’s because, whatever they lose on the Birmingham strike, they are convinced that they will gain it all back tenfold in an orgy of privatisation and attacks on the wages and working conditions of council workers across the nation.

But where are the trade unions?

The wider trade union movement has done virtually nothing to highlight to their members and the wider public exactly what is being done to the Birmingham bin workers. The best that they could muster together was an open letter, published in the Morning Star newspaper – a paper with a daily circulation of less than 10,000! 

This pitting of worker against worker – in this case the pitting of council workers against their agency counterparts – is a deliberate and cynical ploy on the part of the ruling class to undermine working class solidarity. They put unrelenting downward pressure on wages, while burying workers in debt through readily-available credit and mortgages to buy their homes – a pincer movement which many workers are unable to ably resist.

To avoid a potential tidal wave of attacks on wages and conditions, workers across Britain MUST organise themselves – not only in support of the Birmingham strikers but to make plain to employers everywhere that workers are ready and willing to fight to defend their hard-earned jobs, pay and conditions. 

Support the strikers! Stop the agency workers!

Public service workers in Unite the Union received a summer bulletin on August 11^th 2025, yet there was not a single word on the Birmingham bin strike, the longest all-out strike seen in Britain in years!

Why keep the developments in this dispute from their own members? It’s because fundamentally, Unite does not want to come into conflict with the British ruling class and especially not their elected agents, the Labour Party, who Unite have been bankrolling for decades. The pernicious link between the trade unions and the Labour Party, which has endured for over a hundred years, has led countless workers’ struggles into humiliating defeat and it must be broken, once and for all.

Birmingham City Council pays private waste agencies millions of pounds every year “to provide contingency cover for leave, sickness and to cover vacancies in Waste” [as quoted from their website]. These agency workers know very well that they are undermining the strikers by working on while their comrades are on picket lines but, despite them having bills to pay and mouths to feed, their actions have helped lead to this war of utter attrition that the Birmingham bin strike has become. 

It is disgraceful that rather than campaign, not only to resist the continued proliferation of agency work (also known as non-permanent labour) in the public sector, but to wipe from history once and for all the use of non-permanent labour in councils, the NHS and other public-sector fields, Unite and other trade unions have sat back and looked on passively as councils, government and NHS management have handed over dozens of functions and the workers which perform them over to the private sector, responding only to attempt to organise these workers as trade union members.

However, in this dispute at least, the hand of Unite has been forced. On 27th October, Unite announced via its website that it would be balloting its members working for the Job & Talent agency for strike action over ‘bullying, harassment and the threat of blacklisting’. A senior manager was caught on camera stating that workers at Job & Talent would be blacklisted from permanent positions in Birmingham City Council if they did not cross bin workers’ picket lines.

It is ironic that a deadlocked dispute which appeared to have the capacity to grind on seemingly forever could be broken by a group of agency workers. If these workers vote for strike action and if Unite co-ordinate their actions with the bin strikers of Birmingham City Council, then the possibility that rubbish piling high on the streets of Birmingham could cause public unrest and force the government and the council to back down and reach a settlement with both groups of workers is a very real one, and one which could give victory to the workers of both sides.

But workers must demand full backing from their unions, or else their ‘leaders’ must be thrown out of their well-paid positions – in short order!