BIRMINGHAM binworkers began indefinite strike action yesterday, Tuesday 11 March, determined to defeat the ‘commissioners’, who were handed control of the council by the previous government and are overseeing massively damaging budget cuts across the city.
Unite union national officer Onay Kasab said: ‘The commissioners have no place in Birmingham.
‘Unelected means unaccountable and uncaring, it is time for the Labour government to remove the commissioners.
‘It is time for an end to cutting jobs, services and pay while pouring money meant for the public sector into the coffers of agencies.’
Birmingham council was wasting millions of pounds on expensive employment agencies prior to strike action, with the costs now expected to be even higher.
A freedom of information (FOI) request by the union Unite shows that Birmingham council had 493 temporary workers on its books as of 31 December 2024 paying an average of £18.44 an hour per worker to the Job&Talent employment agency.
This equates to £38,400 a year on a standard work schedule of 40 hours per week for 52 weeks.
The council had 736 directly employed workers within its Fleet and Waste Operations Service on the same date – meaning temporary workers made up around 40 per cent of the waste workforce rather than the 20 per cent the council claims.
Most of the directly employed workers are paid between £24,027 and £25,992 – just slightly more than the £23,795 workers on the minimum wage earn annually.
Employing 493 temporary agencies workers full-time would cost the council approximately £18.9 million.
The same number of directly employed workers with salaries of £25,000 a year equates to £12.3 million.
The disarray within Birmingham council’s refuse service is further exposed as the combined number of permanent and agency staff was revealed to be 1,229.
This is 237 workers over the 992 posts in the council’s refuse service.
The additional spending on hundreds of extra agency staff is occurring at a time when the council is effectively bankrupt, run by government-appointed commissioners and making huge cuts, while also steeply increasing council tax bills.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: ‘Birmingham council has been wasting millions upon millions boosting agency profits.
‘That makes the pay attacks on its directly employed refuse workforce even more disgraceful.
‘It would be cheaper and fairer to cut out the middleman, employ long serving agency staff directly and halt the brutal wage cuts.
‘Instead, the council has decided to waste even more money by using Job&Talent to provide unlawful labour to undermine the strikes.
‘This is a collision course to failure – our members won’t break and Unite is backing them all the way.’
Agency costs for the council are now likely much higher, as Unite says it has evidence that the council and Job&Talent are unlawfully using agency labour to try and break the strike.
According to the council’s FOI response, the longest serving agency worker began working for the council’s refuse service on 7th November 2011 – 13 years ago.
Many other agency workers have worked for the council for a decade or more.
The workers began strike action in January over the scrapping of the waste collection and recycling officer role, which has impacted 150 workers with pay cuts of up to £8,000.
Removing the role also affects the rest of the low paid workforce by leaving them without a fair path for pay progression even after years of service in a demanding, dirty and difficult job.
The workers already voluntarily accepted cuts to pay and terms and conditions to assist the council after it declared bankruptcy – including giving up £1,000 in shift pay. They now believe that further attacks to jobs and wages will follow.
Labour cuts drive millions deeper into hardship
LABOUR’S plans for billions of pounds of cuts to the welfare budget, which are to be outlined in full in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s spring statement on 26 March, have come under fire from charities and anti-poverty groups.
The financial insecurity charity Turn2Us warned the threat of cuts is ‘alarming’, with benefits ‘already eroded to the point where they fall far short of covering the cost of living.’
Meagan Levin, policy and public affairs manager at Turn2us, warned that benefit coverage has already been eroded to the point that ‘many are without food or heating’.
She said: ‘More cuts will likely push people even deeper into hardship. Instead of stripping away support, we need a stronger safety net that makes sure everyone can afford the essentials.’
Disabled households need to spend at least £625 more a year for the basics, with some facing at least £200 more a month in utility bills to run life-saving medical equipment, disability charity Scope said.
It fears that many disabled people live in pain and fear of losing vital support if their benefits are cut.
James Taylor, executive director of strategy at Scope, said: ‘Cutting benefits will only boost poverty, and making the choice to cut benefits will have a devastating impact on disabled people and their families.
‘Investment in tailored, non-compulsory employment support will help disabled people and the economy
‘But making it harder to get benefits will just push even more disabled people into poverty, not into jobs.
‘The chancellor has a choice – cut benefits and increase poverty, or invest in an equal future for disabled people.’
The benefit cuts also fail to take into account the number of people experiencing in-work poverty, with more than one in five people in the UK in this category in 2021/22 – accounting for 14.4 million people.
A United Nations report released last Monday expressed concern over the government’s ‘insufficient social spending’, particularly in the context of rapidly rising inflation.
The report, from the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, urged the government to remove the two-child benefit cap, scrap the five-week wait for people claiming their first Universal Credit payment, and end the income tax thresholds freeze introduced in 2022.
‘Ministers may claim they’ve inherited this crisis, but they are still making political choices that deepen poverty and inequality,’ Jess McQuail, director of Just Fair, which campaigns for positive social change.
‘Instead of restoring our social protections and upholding people’s fundamental rights, they are continuing with policies that erode the basic conditions people need to live with dignity.
‘The UN committee’s conclusions lay bare what is evident to people in the UK struggling to put food on the table and behind on their bills,’ Kartik Raj, senior Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch.
‘The government should end the two-child limit and benefit cap, and cut the wait for Universal Credit. This is a matter of people’s human rights. Every day of inaction pushes more people into poverty.
‘The committee has called for a cumulative assessment of these social security policies and other austerity measures, and will continue to exercise scrutiny when it follows up with the UK government in two years time.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and New Economics Foundation (NEF) have warned that talk of cutting billions from the welfare budget ‘is causing deep fear among people with serious and ongoing health problems’.
It said the hardest-hit people ‘can’t bear the brunt of the need to balance the government’s books.
‘As the government reportedly prepares to announce billions in cuts to health-related benefits, the hardship people claiming these benefits already experience cannot be ignored.
‘Almost a quarter of working-age adults in a family receiving these benefits have had to use a food bank in the last year.’
New analysis by the JRF and NEF has outlined the consequences of potential welfare cuts on people who receive benefits.
It reveals that 50% of people receiving the health-related element of Universal Credit are either unable to heat their home, behind on bills, or have low or very low food security.
In addition, the analysis found that most are in the lower half of the income distribution.
The JRF and NEF warn that a £4 billion cut to the UC health-related element could either reduce the number of people in receipt of the benefit by 1.1 million or cut payments by 67%, or £3,400 per year.
Reducing PIP (Personal Independence Payment) expenditure by £2 billion in 2029/30 would require at least 310,000 fewer people to be receiving PIP, or for the average PIP award to be 7% lower in value.
JRF Senior Policy Adviser, Iain Porter, said: ‘Many people will be waiting anxiously to hear what the government is planning in their upcoming green paper but talk of cutting billions is causing deep fear among people with serious and ongoing health problems.
‘Almost a quarter of working-age adults in a family receiving these benefits have had to use a foodbank in the last year, and further hardship will do nothing to improve the nation’s health.’
Porter said that the government’s green paper needs to address the underlying causes of poor health, support people to stay in work and those who feel feel unable to take the risk of losing their benefits if a job doesn’t work out.
‘The Chancellor has an unenviable task but she does have choices, and in an increasingly uncertain world, the financial pain and risk shouldn’t be passed on to those who can least afford it in the form of cuts’.