Running time: 2 mins 43 secs
As the Birmingham binworkers go into their ninth month of all out strike to stop paycuts of up to £8,000 by the local Labour council, angry residents – 9 out of 10 of whom support the strike, from UNITE the Union’s research – made their feelings known in Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s constituency.
While UNITE hosted a community event there bringing binworkers together with the local community, the mosque and local politicians, binworkers put up estate agent style boards, demanding Labour settle the dispute, in people’s front gardens all over the constituency. The boards are now literally everywhere, as resident after resident expressed their anger at the rubbish piling up, the unfairness of how the binworkers have been treated – and their fury at Shabana Mahmood never being present in their streets and doing nothing to sort things out.
The beleaguered Labour council are now not only facing a furious electorate, but an escalating dispute. Agency workers who have been used to do the striking binworkers work are now so angry at their treatment – which includes bullying, harassment, threats of blacklisting, inadequate PPE, unsafe working conditions and unreasonable workloads – that they are now coming out on official strike too.
The first day of joint strike action is on December 1. If you live in Birmingham or are able to get there that day, please come and support; this could be a major turning point, not just for the binworkers but for workers at councils across the country, who are watching this dispute closely to see if they can get away with similar appalling wage cuts.
