Around 300 pickets descended on three waste removal depots in Birmingham at 4am on Friday 25 July. News had leaked that the scab agency workers had been told to turn up two hours early to avoid the pickets. Too bad, we were ready.
A court injunction (or two) had forbidden strikers from occupying the road outside the depot entrances. They stood on the other side but made their presence well and truly felt, hurling loud abuse almost constantly, every other word ‘scab’ with a few choice adjectives thrown in.
They had been all out on indefinite strike for 19 weeks, for eight months in total. They had not lost any of their determination or anger. Who could blame them? In the past week a Section 118 notice had been delivered to them, effectively telling them they would be fired or they could be rehired (with an £8-10,000 pay loss) in 45 days’ time.
For over five hours pickets from near and far, from the Birmingham and the Black Country just as much as from London and Edinburgh, paced up and down in front of a queue of six or seven wagons, or dustcarts, and several day-hire vans. They weren’t moving, no matter how many times the front driver turned the key and revved up.
Conversations on the picket line varied from personal workplace and union branch issues to the genocide in Gaza, via Corbyn and Sultana’s new party. The obstacles put in activists’ way by the bureaucratic leaderships was a thread running through, whether it was on Palestine solidarity or trans rights at work.
Humour was ever present, not just with the chants and the songs (the PA had a fighting playlist that drew from the decades), but also with one young keffiyeh-ed picket shaking his ass in front of every scab who tried to come into work. They and quite a few Veolia wagons also turned away, many with a hoot and a wave.
The police made one semi-serious attempt to disperse the picket, but they were soon surrounded by shouting pickets. ‘You’re obstructing the highway. Please move,’ one told me. ‘No, not doing that,’ I replied. Game over.
The police retreated to make a few calls, and within half an hour, the wagons, starting from the rear, reversed and turned. ‘Shut the gate!’ we yelled, echoing the famous Saltley Gate slogan from 1972, and soon it was. We’d won. For the day.
Corbyn speaks
The vast majority of the pickets stuck around for Jeremy Corbyn to speak; we were the last of the three picket lines he visited (and then he was off to see the doctors!). It was the day after yourparty.uk had been announced and already 120,000 supporters had signed up. There was a fair bit of excitement.
Corbyn knew his stuff about the strike, the role of Angela Rayner, the use of the anti-union laws, which he pledged to abolish, and the crisis facing the councils and local services.
He also promised to nationalise mail, rail and the utilities, including water. On Gaza, he called for an arms embargo, sanctions and divestment, and for a state of Palestine to be recognised, i.e. a two-state solution.
This last point exposes the limits of Corbyn’s reformist politics, not daring to call for the revolutionary dissolution of Israel into a single secular state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. However, Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish chauvinist colonial state, which Corbyn supports, would mean that all the drivers for this genocide remain in place.
But Corbyn wasn’t the only speaker for the new party; local MP Ayoub Khan was there to introduce him. Khan was known to many as he was their Perry Barr MP. I was informed later that he had been a Lib Dem for 20 years and earlier in the dispute had called for soldiers to be deployed clearing the rubbish.
Yet as a member of the Independent Alliance group of MPs, Khan will have a key say in how the party is set up. That can’t be right. The fight for democracy, as well as programme, will be of vital importance in the coming few months, it the new party is to prove a move to the left and a step in the direction of rearming the working class for the battles to come.
How to win
But the first of those battles starts right here with the bin strike. The megapicket was a huge boost, with dozens of strikers showing their gratitude to those of us who could come down in person. Massive congratulations must go to Henry Fowler, Strike Map and others, who made it possible. But it’s not the answer, not in isolation. Because what happens Monday? The wagons roll again.
Without exception every striker I spoke to wanted the strike to be escalated, for more Unite sections and branches to join the strike, for pressure to be put on other unions to come out alongside them. One told me that when Sharon Graham and Onay Kasab came down a few weeks back, the strikers had given them a hard time over the strike going nowhere.
But where to start? Clearly Graham’s Unite leadership is not going to call out other sections. And certainly Unison won’t. So it has to start from below, with the strikers themselves., the rank and file. We’re running out of time, because it is easier to stop the hand of redundancy than to remove it once it’s gripped you.
Rank and file binworkers should leaflet and talk to the best of the rest of the council workforce, be they street cleaners (many of whom are already out unofficially), traffic wardens, housing or librarians, wherever they’ve received a sympathetic hearing before. They need to demand, join our strike! You’re next if we lose! If sections of workers are brave enough to defy the anti-union laws and walk out on a given day, then great, they’ll inspire others. If not, they can start a petition, pester their branch officers and call a union meeting where the question of solidarity strike action can be put.
These are tactics that the British working class discovered many decades ago. But they have fallen into disuse, mainly as a result of poor leadership that has preached passivity and blindly obeying bad laws.
The megapicket showed that we can relearn these ‘old’ methods of the class struggle: the mass picket, flying pickets, solidarity strikes. If Ozzy Osbourne’s passing brings back nostalgia for the Birmingham 1970s, then let’s revive the trade union struggle, from the bottom up.
