The overwhelming vote by 400 Birmingham bin workers on Monday to reject a pay cutting offer from their employer was a decisive blow against not just the Labour-run council but the Labour government.
Ever since the strike started on March 11, these strikers have been subjected to a public campaign of lies from both the council and the Labour government designed to undermine their strike.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: ‘For weeks these workers have faced attacks from the government and their employer pushing the lie that only a handful of workers were affected by the council’s plan to cut pay by up to £8,000.’
From the outset, the bin workers and their Unite trade union have insisted that the strike was not over an increased pay demand but to stop the deliberate slashing of their existing pay.
The average pay of Birmingham’s bin workers is only just above that of the national minimum wage, and as Graham said ‘these workers simply cannot afford to take pay cuts of this magnitude to pay the price for bad decisions after bad decisions.’
These workers have already voluntarily accepted cuts to pay and conditions – including giving up £1,000 in shift pay after the council declared itself bankrupt – and are now clearly saying ‘enough is enough’.
However, Graham is wrong to accept the position that ‘bad decisions’ by Birmingham’s council bosses are to blame. What has driven the onslaught on pay is not ‘bad decisions’ but all the years of funding cuts to local councils, along with every other section of public services imposed by successive Tory governments following the world economic crash of capitalism in 2008.
The years of Tory austerity, wage freezes and cuts to services were imposed on the backs of workers and their families in a desperate effort to bail out a bankrupt British capitalist system.
The trade union leaders assured their members and the working class that a Labour government would be different, they swallowed Labour leader Keir Starmer’s promise of a Labour government that would be the ‘friend’ of working people.
As Graham herself admitted last week: ‘We thought when Labour came in they would stop what was happening, we were wrong.’
This admission hasn’t stopped Graham and Unite appealing to the Labour government to intervene in the Birmingham strike by calling a meeting with the union and council bosses to achieve a negotiated settlement of the strike.
In fact, the Labour government has already intervened – not to resolve the strike by ensuring no pay cuts but to draft in the army.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s local government secretary, on Monday (while the ballot was taking place) invoked the Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (MACA) to draft in army experts to offer ‘logistical support’ to break the strike.
Rayner insists that she has no intention of putting the army on the ground in Birmingham, just a handful of military personnel with operational expertise to tackle the crisis.
‘Tackling the crisis’ could well mean using army expertise to co-ordinate an army of ‘agency’ workers in a massive strike-breaking operation.
Meanwhile, bin strikes and industrial action by public service workers are rapidly spreading across the entire UK, with a Unite source telling the Telegraph newspaper that several local authorities are in similar situations to Birmingham and that workers are prepared to strike against further wage cuts.
A revolutionary confrontation between the working class and a Labour government determined to inflict super-austerity cuts to try to keep the bankers and bosses from bankruptcy has rapidly emerged.
In this revolutionary situation the issue of leadership is crucial. The TUC leaders see no alternative to Starmer, while the powerful working class is posed with the need for a new and revolutionary leadership in the trade unions.
The urgent task is to develop a leadership prepared to organise the massive strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Labour government and bring in a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
Join the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists to build up the revolutionary leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
There is no time to lose.
