By Jeremy Dewar
Unite the Union’s 2025 delegate conference erupted in anger on its penultimate day, 10 July, with news that Birmingham Labour leader John Cotton had ‘walked away’ from ACAS talks (without ever having attended them, it might be added), and threatened to sack 130 striking bin workers, unless they accept up to £8,000 in pay cuts.
By the following morning, Unite Broad Left members, to their credit, had put forward an emergency motion, which condemned Birmingham City Council for their ‘fire and rehire’ threat, but also the Labour government for supporting the council and the unelected ‘commissioners, originally appointed by the Tories and maintained by Labour’.
To some disapproval from senior United Left members, the motion went on to say that ‘Unite should discuss our relationship with Labour’ if striking bin workers were sacked. Dramatically it demanded the immediate suspension of ‘Angela Rayner and all Birmingham councillors who are Unite members’ pending an investigation ‘with a view to permanently expelling them from the union’.
The motion was passed overwhelmingly by the 800 delegates.
Rayner dodging responsibility
Angela Rayner has been following a well-thumbed Labour ministerial playbook through the bin workers’ six month dispute. As Minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government, she could have sacked the commissioners who were appointed by the Tories to ‘balance the books’ after the council went bankrupt, she could have cancelled the council’s debt, and she could have overridden John Cotton and settled the dispute.
Instead she pretended to wash her hands of the dispute, while behind the scenes supporting the council’s use of scab agency labour, the secondment of army logistics officers to coordinate the scabbing operation, and the use of police to clear pickets away from depot entrances.
Publicly Rayner has attempted to paint the dispute as alternately an attack on women’s right to equal wages and/or costing the council hundreds of millions of pounds raising women’s wages to the level of the ‘greedy’ and, supposedly, exclusively male wagon drivers.
Rayner showed her true face, behind the working class mask, when she petulantly let it be known that she had left Unite months ago. As Sharon Graham said, ‘If I was Angela Rayner this morning, I wouldn’t be trying to do a Houdini act on whether, technically, she was or she wasn’t’ a Unite member, adding pointedly, she was ‘very clearly a member when she asked us to give her £10,000 for the election’. Indeed. Only a Labour minister would have the gall to accept ten grand as a grant, then stop paying their subs within the year without even letting the union know.
Strategy
But the rift with Rayner is not as complete as it would at first seem. Graham was at pains to stress that the decision to disaffiliate from Labour would be ‘a serious decision, not a rash decision. It goes to the rules conference’, i.e. years down the track. Even the Broad Left motion wanted ‘Angela Rayner to lead on negotiations on behalf of Birmingham City Council,’ not to be sacked.
Indeed the Broad Left and its leading component the Socialist Party have no strategic answer to the council’s intransigence, other than to support the mega picket on 25 July and to call a national Unite demo in Birmingham (on a Saturday of course, not a call for strike action).
Socialist Worker is not much better, calling for ‘mass picketing—sustained by solidarity from the trade union movement’, which is left suitably vague. Do they mean other sections, Unite, Unison, GMB, etc. taking strike action? Or just sending union officers to a picket line? Or financial donations?
In truth it needs to be the former – and all bin strikers and their supporters need to start saying that clear and loud. The formal ‘consultation’ period on the mass sackings starts on 16 July; redundancy notices will be sent out before September – unless we up the ante and turn the bin workers’ latent support within the Birmingham working class into active solidarity action.
- Expel Rayner and all the Birmingham councillors from Unite – and every other bona fide trade union.
- Support the mega picket on 25 July – and use the additional power to picket out other council officers.
- Link the disputes across the councils to demand the Labour government fully funds local government to deliver decent services, jobs and wages.
This can only be achieved by rank and file elected strike committees and fighting combines organising to take the Birmingham bin strike out of the officials’ hands, so they can demand Graham and lead negotiator Onay Kasab spread the strike, or do it themselves.
