At 6.00am on Tuesday 11 March 2025 refuse workers employed by Birmingham city council began an all-out strike. The strike, which is still ongoing at the time of writing this article, is the latest in a series of actions that have taken place in Birmingham since the beginning of the year.
The origins of this dispute, which is growing increasingly bitter, can be traced all the way back to 2010, but it came to a head in September 2023, when Birmingham city council issued a section 114 notice. This notice, issued under section 114 of the 1988 Local Government Act, declared the council insolvent, amounting to a de facto declaration of bankruptcy. At the time the notice was issued by the council’s financial officer, an £87m deficit remained unresolved.
In accordance with the Local Government Act, the national government in Westminster appointed commissioners (in effect, administrators) to comb through the council’s financial records and inevitably implement swingeing cost-cutting measures in an attempt to eliminate the deficit.
Councils across Britain face bankruptcy
Birmingham is by no means an outlier in its financial struggles. It has joined a growing list of councils that have experienced insolvency over the last three years. These councils include prominent institutions such as Thurrock in Essex, Woking in Surrey, Croydon in London, and, just two months after Birmingham declared bankruptcy, Nottingham city council did the same. In the case of Croydon, it was the third time that the council had declared insolvency in just three years.
Councils’ finances over the last 15 years have been driven on an inexorable path towards insolvency, chiefly because of the throttling of central government funding, which began with the austerity drive under David Cameron’s coalition government of 2010, but also because, with the tacit approval of central government, councils have speculated considerable sums of council taxpayers’ money on risky schemes.
Often, councils have speculated their paltry reserves on hair-brained schemes in the hope that the anticipated returns would bridge the gap between the finances that they had to hand and the amount that they needed in order to provide anything like a minimum level of public service. These councils either did not understand, or more likely were not willing to consider, the potentially huge risks that they were taking with public funds.
In the case of Birmingham, the council’s troubles centred not so much on profligate speculation as on serious financial mismanagement. Principally, a £100m cost overrun on the implementation of a new Oracle IT system, which the council reportedly demanded be heavily customised to fit in with its pre-existing HR processes and practices.
The subsequent delays and costs that resulted from this demanded customisation led the council leader, John Cotton, to seek approval for the extra money needed to fix the problems. The council approved £46.5m, less than half the estimated cost.
Despite years of cuts to public services, the city council finally admitted defeat with the issuing of the Section 114 order. Commissioners, appointed to hack and slash the council’s financial obligations, decided to save costs by decreeing that some of the city’s refuse workers (specifically the refuse lorry drivers and loaders) would have their role abolished and be downgraded, in turn having their pay reduced – in some cases by £8,000 per year, which was a hammer blow to the affected workers in the midst of an ongoing and seemingly never-ending cost-of-living crisis.
Workers suffer as dispute festers on with no resolution in sight
The all-out strike that followed has resulted in household refuse piling high in Birmingham’s suburban streets, with reports of dozens of rats scurrying from pile to pile of refuse in broad daylight. According to social media, when council-appointed agency refuse trucks arrived, residents were seen to be scuffling in the streets to be first to dispose of their accumulated waste.
There appears to be little sign of the council seeking a swift end to the dispute. On 25 March, Unite the Union, which represents the bin workers, criticised the council’s apparent reluctance to negotiate. According to Unite, there had been a full week between negotiation meetings with the council, which has refused to rule out further attacks on the terms and conditions of refuse workers who are not currently affected by downgrading and pay cuts.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham asked: “Are the council’s decision-making abilities being hobbled by unelected commissioners? If that’s the case, the council needs to be honest with its workers and the public and tell them exactly what decisions it can and cannot make without the commissioners’ permission.”
Meanwhile, the trade union movement as a whole has done very little in the way of giving tangible support to the strikers. In fact, the most tangible support given to the action amounted to an open letter, signed by the general secretaries of 25 trade unions, including the train drivers’ union Aslef, the civil service union PCS and the Fire Brigades’ Union (FBU). The letter stated:
”After 14 years of austerity that have a damaging impact on our communities, services and society, it is imperative that urgent investment be made to deliver the transformative change that the people need.
”The proposed cuts to Birmingham bin workers, up to £8,000 annually, represent a continuation of austerity, not its end.
”We reject the council’s assertion that these cuts are driven by a desire for equal pay.
”Consequently, we reject the notion that pay equality is synonymous with reducing pay in a ‘race to the bottom’ and instead advocate for a more equitable approach of ‘levelling up’.”
Equal pay claim – former costs and current excuse
The reference to the council’s assertion that the huge pay cuts proposed for bin workers were being ‘driven by a desire for equal pay’ refers to a legal claim against Birmingham city council that dates back to 2010.
The case was brought by 4,000 female claimants at employment tribunal who worked in a wide variety of of jobs, including cooks, cleaners and administrative staff. They claimed that they had been financially disadvantaged by missing out on bonuses that were given to male employees, including awards for exemplary attendance.
It was claimed that men could earn up to 160 percent of the amount paid to women in the equivalent pay grade as a result of these schemes. Amongst the roles that were in equivalent grades was the waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO) role – the very role that Birmingham city council’s commissioners have proposed be abolished, slashing these workers’ wages to the tune of up to £8,000 per year.
Indeed, it was in February of this year that the council’s own auditors warned its leadership that the role must be abolished if they are to avoid future legal liabilities.
At the time of the women workers’ legal victory in 2010, solicitors estimated that the cost to the council in compensating those affected could be as much as £200m. Instead of paying up, however, the council went on to spend the next decade and a half, and an estimated £1.1bn of council funds, paying legal fees to fight the ruling on top of eventually paying the awarded compensation.
As a result, some workers had to wait 14 years, and go through protracted negotiations via their trade unions, before receiving their settlements.
Performative solidarity but no meaningful support or progress
The only other tangible action that the labour movement has participated in to support the striking workers has been a one-day so called ‘mega picket’, which took place in Birmingham on 9 May, and which can best be described as tokenistic.
Organised by Strike Map, the picket was attended by organisations specialising in token protests, including the Socialist Workers’ party (SWP), the ‘Revolutionary Communist’ party (RCP) (which sent a contingent of mainly students) and the Socialist party – in effect the bulk of Britain’s Trotskyite organisations, along with Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, the CPB-led People’s Assembly and a smattering of trade unions representatives.
Altogether, the mega picket was attended by some 200 to 300 people which, while being the largest mobilisation of support for the strikers to date, is not by any means a ‘mega’ picket. As ever, choosing to descend on a picket line on a weekday precluded many working-class people from attending, quite apart from the general futility of performative one-day ‘actions’.
What is remarkable about this dispute is the complete failure on all sides to work meaningfully towards a resolution. On 21 May, Ms Graham was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, where she was questioned about the dispute by host Justin Webb.
He opened the interview by asking if there were any talks taking place, and Graham responded by saying that the government and the council’s government-appointed leadership had said that Unite should accept the “fair” offer made to the union – an offer which Graham said that the union had not seen and does not believe to exist!
She went on to say that if there were in fact a ‘fair’ offer that could be put to the membership, then the council’s negotiators should put that offer on the table, albeit almost three weeks after negotiations at the arbitration, conciliation and advisory service (also known as Acas) had begun.
Webb pointed out that, while Graham was calling on the council’s commissioners and negotiators to put their much-vaunted offer officially before Unite, she was also in effect calling on the “relevant government minister”, namely deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, to put a tangible offer in front of the striking workers.
Graham said that Unite had expected an offer to be tabled on 8 May, but, as of 21 May, no offer had been forthcoming, since it was allegedly awaiting ‘sign-off’ from the government-appointed commissioners. Graham quite rightly asserted that ‘government-appointed commissioners’ was nothing more than a pseudonym for the government itself, and that the leader of the council had not been seen at any time during negotiations.
The thrust of Graham’s argument was that Unite’s negotiators have not been in discussions with the real decision-makers – in effect, the leadership of the city council and the national government. Graham also reported that she had asked Angela Rayner for “a conversation” (what exactly she meant by this was not made clear), but has been effectively stonewalled by the deputy prime minister.
The link with Labour
It should be pointed out that Sharon Graham leads a trade union, Unite the Union, that has bankrolled the same Labour party that led Birmingham city council into bankruptcy to the tune of millions of pounds of its own members’ money. At no point during this dispute, or indeed any other dispute with Labour-led councils affecting Unite members (and there have been many over the years), have Graham or her predecessors ever made the funding of the Labour party an issue for reconsideration.
Effectively, like the leaders of every other Labour-affiliated trade union, Graham makes a show of occasionally ‘challenging’ the Labour leadership, but keeps both hands tied behind her back while she does so.
The tactics of Unite the Union and Unison, which are supposed to represent the striking workers, must also be brought into question. To date, only the waste recycling and collection officers have been balloted for strike action – Unite has failed to mobilise any other waste management workers, while Unison has been strangely reticent throughout the dispute.
The council’s commissioners appear to be focused on mass privatisation of services and the trade unions seem simply to have been sidelined as irrelevant.
In the meantime, the rubbish continues to pile in the streets, the rats continue to run free and the lives of Birmingham’s working class, already affected by the cost-of-living crisis, are made even worse.
Councils across the length and breadth of the country have been in a parlous financial state for decades, but 15 years of austerity, imposed by the Conservatives and then ramped up by the Labour government, means that more councils, whose tax rises are capped at 5 percent (which explains why so many council tax bills recently rose by 4.9 percent), will follow the likes of Birmingham, Nottingham, Croydon et al into bankruptcy.
It is the working class who inevitably suffer the effects of central government-sponsored austerity and council profligacy and speculation. It is they who are deprived of basic services, forced to pay higher and higher council tax bills while receiving less and less in return.
There is no choice for workers but to refuse any longer to listen to the ruling class’s endless promises to tinker round the edges of this system. It must be swept away and replaced with a planned socialist economy, where services are provided based on the needs of the people, free at the point of use and fully funded, run by and for the working class.
