‘Supporting trade unionists is in my blood but it’s time to stop automatic support for Birmingham refuse workers’

It is six o’clock in the morning, in a Birmingham suburban street. Everything is quiet and still. Then suddenly there is a rumbling of engines and a clatter of wheelie bins. This is before last year, and the refuse workers have arrived. They go at the gallop. The bin lorry goes up and down the road as fast as it can. The bins are emptied in a rush, and left anywhere, away from the houses they belong to, sometimes at the end of the street. Rubbish from bins that have been quickly tipped – or bags that have broken being taken to the lorry – is left in the road.

Some weeks this didn’t happen, because it just wasn’t collected. About one week in every three from my experience, though sometimes there were three week gaps between collections.

This was the reality of bin collections in Birmingham until Unite went on strike a year ago. It was a practice called Task and Finish. That meant that when they had finished their allotted round they were free to go home. A big incentive to go fast and do as little as you can get away with. Task and Finish was supposed to have stopped in 2015 but it didn’t. It came back with Covid, and was still going in 2022, when lorries were filmed leaving Tyseley depot at 5a.m. and coming back at 9a.m having done rounds which were meant to take a day.

READ MORE:It’s bin a year…Unite strikes in Birmingham continue past the 12 month mark

It’s easy for Labour people to believe Unite when they paint their members as working class heroes victimised by a wicked unworthy Labour council. They have a magnificent press operation. Experiencing their service, though, gives you pause. And what makes things worse is their role in the financial problems of Birmingham city council.

In 2023 Birmingham issued a section 114 notice, which meant the council was unable to meet its debts: what the unsympathetic local press called ‘bankruptcy’. The result was two years of drastic service cuts. They included closing libraries and reducing hours; significant cuts to adult social care and children’s services; and a phased withdrawal of all arts grants, including that to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Council tax rose by 10% in 2024 and 7.5% in 2025. It’s been a painful experience for all Brummies. But this is where the Unite refuse workers come in.

The main cause of the section 114 notice was the liability from equal pay claims. There was also a significant problem with a new computer service, but the biggest issue was and is equal pay. Local authority job grading is done by a national system which allows very different jobs to be compared against each other.

Nationally, refuse workers are at grade 2. So are women care workers and some administrative staff. The Unite refuse workers have, over the years, succeeded in gaining a special status, and protecting it by ruthless industrial action. We’ve had strikes in 2010, 2018-19, and again now. It’s a bit like Longbridge in the 1970s, and I think that’s where the culture originated. Union power did for any attempt to get rid of ‘Task and Finish’.

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Part of the Unite workers’ special status is that a lot of them were paid at grade 3 rather than 2. As part of the deal that ended the previous strike, some of them were made Waste Recycling and Collection Officers, with an increase in grading. It’s difficult to see what extra they do for this. Birmingham bin rounds are like everywhere else’s and the staff do the same tasks. Unite have talked about ‘safety critical’ roles but that comes down to things like acting as banksman in front of reversing lorries in cul-de-sac streets: something which would be part of the job anywhere else. (As a personal note, my old job as a manager took me into transport yards and if a reversing HGV driver asked me to act as banksman, I did it without hesitation.)

The Waste Recycling and Collection Officers do what ordinary refuse workers do everywhere else. But because they are at grade 3, women council workers, backed reasonably by their unions, particularly Unison, have been able to claim equal pay with them. There is a parallel situation with some drivers being graded at 4 not 3. And from both of these come the biggest cause of Birmingham City Council’s financial troubles. The Unite refuse workers are at the bottom of it. Significantly, there haven’t been any similar equal pay claims elsewhere; yet bins get collected. That’s why the city council has to remove the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer roles. If they remain, there will be even more equal pay claims.

Therefore all the council’s proposals involve removing them. Waste Recycling and Collection Officers will retain their grade 3 pay for six months if they stay as refuse workers. They will be helped to retrain for other council jobs at grade 3. Or they can leave with a reasonable package. Other councils allow workers to retain their pay for longer when their jobs are downgraded. Otherwise it seems a fair offer to me. After all, every refuse worker on grade 3 means social services workers, librarians and community workers being made redundant.

One aspect of the Birmingham bin strike which has not been covered in the media is that not all refuse workers are members of Unite. Some are in the GMB. They are not in dispute. For nearly a year now, we have had ordinary refuse collections, done by GMB members and contract staff. They have happened every week. They’re done properly, without mess. Bins are left near houses. We’re not getting recycling collections, but we are getting a good service for ordinary waste. It’s quite a change.

A problem for Birmingham city council is that it’s the largest local authority in Britain outside London – so it’s a target for everyone (famously Michael Gove) including ambitious union leaders and officers. They don’t have to be Labour supporters. I’ve never heard Sharon Graham say anything positive about Labour, and Onay Kasab, the full timer in charge of the bin strike, is a supporter of the Socialist Party, which used to be the Militant Tendency: the Trotskyist group which infiltrated Labour in the 1980s. He was expelled from Unison in 2011. Birmingham is sitting there waiting to be attacked by people like that. But Labour is at least trying to deal with the problem unlike everyone else.

Supporting trade unionists is in my blood. My Dad was a union branch chair whose committee met round our dining table. I’m a retired member of what was the Society of Telecom Executives (now part of Prospect) and went out on strike twice in my working days. I am also a fairly left wing member of the Labour Party. I voted twice for Jeremy Corbyn and don’t regret it. This is the first time I’ve ever said anything like what follows.

It’s time to stop any automatic support for the Birmingham refuse workers. They have given Birmingham a poor service for years but cost the council tax payers more than anywhere else for it. If they lose, we might get a decent bin service, and manage to protect what’s left of Birmingham’s other municipal services.

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