Last month marked the one year anniversary of the Birmingham bin strike. Workers in the city have waged an heroic struggle against a council attempting to cut their salaries by up to £8,000 per year.
By Paul Callanan, Assistant Branch Secretary, Greenwich Unite LG branch (personal capacity)
They have refused to lay down and pay for the incompetence and financial mismanagement of the Labour-run local authority. Such is the strength of solidarity around the dispute that agency staff who were originally brought in to break the strike have also joined Unite the Union and walked out.
On the anniversary of the strike, Unite’s National Executive met and took the historic decision to cut the union’s affiliation fee to the Labour Party by 40%. That money will now be used to pay for legal fees incurred by the strike. So the Labour Party will now be picking up the tab for a dispute they caused – paying a high price not just politically, but also financially.
It is not lost on Unite members that this dispute is happening not just on the Labour council’s watch, but also under a Labour government.
Fury at Labour
During Unite’s Policy Conference last year, delegates received the news that the council was moving to sack those workers taking strike action and re-engage them on new inferior contracts. These are the very same fire-and-rehire methods that the Labour Party had pledged to make illegal at the last general election.
In response, an emergency motion was voted on by delegates to expel the then-Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner from the union. Rayner, herself a former local government worker and UNISON NEC member, had sided with the council against workers, even going so far as to meet with individuals scabbing on the strike rather than the strikers themselves.
More importantly, the same motion included the call for Unite to conduct a full review of its affiliation to Labour in advance of a Rules Conference to take place this year. Socialist Alternative fully supports calls for disaffiliation from the Labour Party. Such a move would open the way for a full discussion within the union about political representation and the need to build a new party of the working class.
Disaffiliation
In an appearance on Sky News, Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham predicted that Labour will be “decimated” at May’s council elections and said that “if that rules conference was today, we would be disaffiliating”. And she is not wrong! Attendees at last year’s Policy conference will tell you that, had we been able to, we would have disaffiliated from the Labour Party there and then – such is the anger at Labour.
These moves from the union’s leadership come at a decisive moment. At the time of writing, the ballot is open for the election of the National Executive Committee of Unite. Later this year, Graham herself is up for re-election as the union’s General Secretary.
Graham was elected in 2021 as an independent left candidate pledging to take the union back to the workplace – emphasising action and union democracy. And while there have been important steps forward industrially under her leadership, with the number of strikes and victories increased, her political record has been more mixed.
NEC and General Secretaries elections
Socialist Alternative is supporting candidates from the Workers Unite slate, which supports the programme Graham was elected on in 2021. The slate includes one of the leaders of the Birmingham bin workers. While we are not uncritical cheerleaders of the General Secretary, we recognise the important steps forward that have taken place under her leadership. A victory for this slate would provide the best opportunities to develop Unite as a fighting, militant trade union.
Until now, the majority of the NEC has been composed of supporters of the ‘Reunite the Union’ slate. This presents itself as a new platform, but is in fact a rebrand for elements of the old leadership around former General Secretary Len McClusky. They have already made clear that their approach is to try to do back-room deals with Labour rather than rely on the organising strength of the union to win concessions.
At last year’s policy conference, supporters of the ‘Reunite the Union’ slate attempted to move a whole series of motions which would have drawn the union closer to Labour. In an embarrassing climbdown, these motions were withdrawn once the level of anger from the conference floor over the Birmingham bin strike, cuts to winter fuel allowance and two-child benefit cap came to the surface.
It is also alleged that briefings to the press designed to undermine the Birmingham bin strike last year came from supporters of their grouping.
Historic opportunities
These elections come at a vital time, for both the union and the workers movement in general. In UNISON, there is great potential following Andrea Egan’s historic victory as a left-wing General Secretary candidate. The left controlling the leading national bodies of Britain’s two biggest unions has the potential to bring about a real shift in the wider movement at a time when workers are facing ever more ferocious attacks from bosses and the government.
In Unite, the task after these elections will be to build a genuine left within the union which can make Sharon Graham’s promise of a member-led, fighting union a reality.
