When the bosses are deaf to reason and blind to justice mass action is the only solution

Downloadable as an A5 leaflet here

Is it just and reasonable for Birmingham Council to make bin workers pay for a financial crisis they didn’t cause?

Is it just and reasonable to pay a clique of financial advisers £1.5m a year when bin workers are facing £8,000 pay cuts?

Birmingham Council and this Labour government are acting like Tories. They are out of touch with working-class people who have lived through years of austerity and are now being asked to pay the price of a failed management and years of cuts to council budgets.

Achieving equal pay by levelling down is a cynical and fraudulent ploy to excuse the cuts our bin workers are facing. Women workers don’t benefit from cuts to the family budget.

Council bosses, financial markets and this government are addicted to austerity, and if the bin workers give in they won’t stop there. The bin strike is part of a bigger fight against attacks on the working class.

Freezing pensioners and putting children and disabled people into poverty has seen this government get a kicking in the recent elections where working class anger has been spectacularly registered. But Reform isn’t the answer – they are as opposed to trade union rights and taxing the rich to pay for our services as are the Tories and Labour.

Council bosses think if they hang tough we will give in. Mega pickets and mass demonstrations will make them think again.

Solidarity is the key

The message is getting out and the old trade union slogan ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ is being heard. Trade unionists across the country are finding out about Birmingham after weeks of media attempts to demonise the bin workers.

But workers fighting back are increasingly seen as giving a lead that we can all get behind. We have a right to decent pay and safe working conditions, and these demands connect to other demands.

We demand a fully funded NHS, education and welfare system. We demand that all our service providers are highly paid and respected, just as we want our service users, the weak and the sick, to be respected and given the right to live in dignity.

Therefore, the bin workers’ fight is a fight for all. And we need to get the message out that the action is not going away. Other council workers across Birmingham and the country are facing cruel attacks under the guise of ‘efficiency savings’.

But there is no evidence that pay cuts for vital workers will increase efficiency. It is also a myth that the money isn’t there to pay us. Britain is the sixth largest economy in the world. The collective wealth of UK billionaires increased by £35m per day in 2024 reaching a total of £182bn. Starmer has committed an extra £13bn to military spending to continue fuelling the genocide in Gaza and war in Ukraine.

Austerity is nothing more than a manufactured excuse to stop taxing the wealth of the super-rich and push for more militarism. It is unjust and obscene nonsense. It is worse rubbish than our bin workers handle every day.

We also need to make it clear that we are not accepting any more cuts and we will call disputes in as many sectors as we can to bring numbers onto the streets. As well as the old slogan ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’, let’s also demand that our union leaders become familiar with ‘one out, all out’.

If Birmingham held a Saturday demonstration in the city centre in solidarity with bin workers and against all council cuts it would get a huge response and help galvanise a working-class fightback.

We are facing a general attack on the working class and only a determined and united response can turn it back. That means spreading the action and building mass solidarity, and it means mobilising a national movement against austerity that affects all working-class people. The Birmingham bin strikers must be central to the 7 June People’s Assembly national demonstration.