Running time: 3 mins 44 secs
In unprecedented scenes, the agency workers recruited by Birmingham City Council to scab on the binworkers strike have been so badly treated that they have balloted for strike action too – and with everyone voting yes, they are now on indefinite strike action themselves, on the same picket lines as the workers they were supposed to be scabbing on.
The Labour council now has the humiliating distinction of being the only employer in UK labour history to face strike action by the very workers they were trying to use to break a strike. You would have thought they might have been savvy enough to treat them well – but no. As the striking agency workers explain here, they’ve suffered from bullying, harassment, overwork, a lack of proper PPE, and threats of blacklisting (never working for the council again) if they refused to cross picket lines.
With solidarity blockades of depots by supporters increasing (necessary because the council took out an injunction to stop the binworkers picketing their own workplaces), and now 9 out of 10 Birmingham residents that the union has spoken to supporting the binworkers, this is beginning to look like a strike that the council can’t win.
