Saturday 19th of April 2025
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we must pay the bin personnel more....

SIR KEIR Starmer has urged striking bin workers to start negotiating as tons of rat-ridden rubbish pile up. 

His challenge came as photos showed a major clean-up was needed to clear a car park in 24 hours in Birmingham. 

The 50ft long, 6ft mound of festering mess had been dumped at Tyseley Community Centre. 

Four bin lorries and a craned truck were brought in overnight to clear it. 

Meanwhile, police put up barriers at the picket line to stop refuse trucks being blocked in the weeks-long dispute row over pay and jobs. 

No 10 said: “Unite need to get round the table with the council to end this strike.” 

However, the union called on Labour to stick up for workers, saying bin crews woke up to a pay cut of £8,000 a year. 

Unite said: “It is not surprising that many workers in Britian question the Labour government’s commitment to working people, when it issues a statement clearly blaming bin workers in a dispute not of their making. 

“The bottom line about this dispute is that these workers, woke up one morning to be told they would be taking up to an £8,000 pay cut. 

They are being made to pay the price for austerity and bad decisions by Birmingham City Council.” 

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/34294126/keir-starmer-binmen-birmingham-walkout-rubbish/

 

The solution is that “work of equal value” does not exist 

Last week we pointed out that to solve the Birmingham binmen strike it is necessary to pay teaching assistants more.

We know what it is too. The insistence that there is a value to something other than what the market determines. Fools have decided to encode into law a nonsense, that there is some definable “value” to a type of work other than market wages. The only economic value anything has is what someone will pay for it. For wages this then becomes the amount folk are willing to pay to get the job done as compared to the amount people will have to be paid to do the job. As and when all the desired labour - yes, of suitable quality - has been hired at whatever price gains willing workers then that’s the value of that labour. There is no other valuation possible.

Well, no other useful or logical valuation possible that is. For clearly it’s possible to be an idiot about it. Which is where we are. In order to clear Birmingham’s streets of 17,000 tonnes of rubbish and the associated rats the size of cats it is necessary to pay teaching assistants more.

Which, given that the teaching assistants aren’t going to be picking up shovels to either move the rubbish or beat the rats is an absurdity. Therefore the policy that led to this is in itself absurd.

Of course, because we are neoliberals and all that we are but just a voice howling in the forest. So, here’s The Observer making the same point:

Those lawyers were Leigh Day, acting on behalf of women working in council roles that didn’t get those kinds of perks – traditionally female-dominated functions such as teaching assistants, cleaners and caterers.

The WRCO job was used as a comparable by Leigh Day to demonstrate that the council discriminated against women in favour of men. Even worse, Birmingham had created the WRCO role five years after it had lost a landmark equal pay claim in 2012, when it had given bonuses to refuse collectors and street cleaners but not to cleaners and caterers. By 2023, it had paid out £1.1bn in a series of compensation claims, and that year effectively went bankrupt. Other similar claims have been lodged against Next, Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and the Co-op.

Last December, Birmingham settled this new claim, brought by GMB and Unison, and agreed in principle to pay a £250m settlement to 6,000 women. The final details are still being worked out and the council is trying to prevent further claims by changing its employment practices – hence the scrapping of the WRCO which led to this year’s strike.

“This is an issue that’s dogged this council for years,” said John Cotton, Birmingham’s leader since 2023. Successive administrations had failed to “eliminate the injustice” he said, “and clearly, if we don’t follow the right processes and procedures relating to pay grading, then we risk opening up a future liability.”

Fixing the problems could mean levelling up pay for the teaching assistants, the cleaners and the caterers, but given Birmingham’s financial problems, adding millions to the payroll is not an option for Cotton.

Howling in the forest we may be but we’re also right. The problem is this asinine assumption that there is “work of equal value” which must then be paid the same wages. The determinant of wages is how much do we have to pay to get enough people to come and do this thing? There is no other valuation possible - or, perhaps, no other without ending up with the truly absurd result that to gain access to sufficient rubbish collectors we must pay the dinner ladies more.

Markets work, prices work, wages are prices in markets. Any and every attempt to usurp this ends in asinine absurdity - as we have here.

Change the law, fools.

Tim Worstall

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-solution-is-that-work-of-equal-value-does-not-exist

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

garbage.....

 

The Birmingham bin workers fight and the lessons of the 2022-23 strike wave
Robert Stevens

 

Britain’s ruling class is voicing concerns over the eruption of mass struggles by the working class against the widely despised Starmer Labour government.

Fears have focused on the Birmingham bin workers’ strike, now in its fifth week. The bin workers are fighting massive wage cuts, attacks on conditions and job destruction by Labour-run Birmingham City Council (BCC) and unelected commissioners.

The Starmer Labour government has responded with a strike-breaking operation, working with BCC officials to mobilise police, security guards and army planners to coordinate scabbing by private contractors supported by neighbouring councils. 

Strikers are being threatened under Section 14 of the Public Order Act, punishable with jail terms, for peaceful picketing. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has invoked powers under Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (MACA) allowing the government to call in the army.

Media headlines have included: “Labour faces summer of union discontent” (Telegraph); “Summer of discontent looms as bins burst and unions back in charge” (Express) “Is Britain heading for a summer of discontent?” (Times). 

The summer of discontent is a stock reference to the 1978-79 “Winter of Discontent”, which saw millions of days of strike action during the Labour government of James Callaghan.

The capitalist press warns there is a danger the bin strikes will spark broader struggles against councils, many run by Labour, imposing austerity just as vicious as Birmingham’s £300 million cuts. 

Presently, the right-wing media points to a small number of existing strikes and those scheduled by university workers and civil servants. But they warn these could soon mushroom. Ballots for strike action by council workers, school and higher education staff, and NHS workers, are pending. 

Media references to the danger of a summer/autumn/winter of discontent are not new, but over the past decade and a half they were made under the Tories. The Birmingham strike is viewed with particular concern because it is the first major struggle by workers against a Labour government. The ruling class correctly anticipates that Starmer cannot enforce Labour’s austerity agenda without provoking mass opposition.

Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have pledged to enforce the most savage austerity measures in the post-war period, destroying what remains of the NHS and the welfare state to pour hundreds of billions into rearmament and war, including leading a “Coalition of the Willing” against Russia. 

If Starmer and Rayner have intervened to savagely break a strike by 350 council workers in Birmingham, it is because they fear a broader challenge in the working class to their government’s plans.

The union bureaucracy insists that broader strike action in support of the Birmingham bin workers cannot be organised due to anti-union laws, rejecting any challenge to their imposition by this hated government. However, it is not the anti-strike laws they fear but a challenge to them by their members that would win mass popular support. They view the anti-strike laws as a valuable instrument reinforcing their own efforts to police the class struggle.

Lessons of the 2022-23 strike wave

Murdoch’s Sun newspaper has depicted unions as being “back in the saddle” after more than a decade of Tory rule, supposedly chomping at the bit and launching fights on every front. Unite leader Sharon Graham and National Education Union (NEU) leader Daniel Kabede--described a “hard left dolt”--are portrayed as militant stalwarts locked in mortal combat with Starmer. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. Britain’s union leaders are not “laying the groundwork for widespread strikes” (Telegraph), they are doing everything possible to isolate, divide and suppress them. 

The Telegraph cites Graham’s declamations that Birmingham could “absolutely” spread to the rest of the country, but Unite is neck-deep in talks with BCC and the Labour government on a “debt restructuring” programme that would preserve the central thrust of Labour’s cuts.

The union bureaucracy is not in conflict with the Starmer government, but in partnership with it. This is true whatever critical noises bureaucrats like Graham and Kabede make to maintain political credibility among their members.

Workers should draw the necessary lessons of the strike wave that broke out in the summer of 2022 that lasted until the early months of 2024. 

More than a decade of austerity following the 2008 global financial meltdown, combined with mass death in the pandemic and rising inflation, produced a resurgence of the class struggle in Britain and internationally, ending a decades-long period of strike-suppression by the trade union bureaucracy. 

But the potential of this movement was stifled. The bureaucracy worked to divide workers’ incipient rebellion, ensuring that strikes by rail workers, bus drivers, post and warehouse workers, teachers and lecturers, NHS workers, HGV drivers and oil rig workers, remained divided.

“Left-wing” officials led by Mick Lynch, Dave Ward and Graham, pursued a twin strategy of 1) curtailing the strike movement while they negotiated behind the scenes with Tory ministers to enforce below-inflation wage deals, and 2) championing the election of a Labour government that would supposedly end 14 years of Tory austerity.

The role of “lefts” like Lynch was crucial under conditions where Starmer was denouncing strikes by rail, postal and public sector workers and banning Labour shadow ministers from visiting picket lines. 

Lynch, who imposed sellout pay deals against his own members, called on workers hesitant about voting for Starmer to “grow up a bit” as Labour was the only alternative.

The trade union bureaucracy and Labour Party are two wings of the same pro-capitalist apparatus that is the mortal enemy of the working class. Indeed, one of Starmer’s main differences with his Tory predecessors was over their failure to recognise the key role played by the union leaders in suppressing the working class and his pledge that Labour would implement an industrial strategy based on structured (corporatist) collusion between government, employers and the union apparatus.

Today Rayner—championed then by union officials as the most sympathetic voice in Starmer’s shadow cabinet for her proposed Workers Rights Bill—is directly organising the police and military planners against the Birmingham bin strike. And the union bureaucracy’s efforts to suppress the class struggle continue unabated. 

The NEU leadership has responded to the overwhelming vote by teachers to reject the government’s 2.8 percent pay offer and their indicative call for strikes by putting off any formal ballot for industrial action until the autumn, amid futile pleas for the government to “reconsider”.

More than 10,000 jobs are being axed throughout the higher education sector. But while isolated strikes have broken out at a handful of universities, no coordinated action is being organised by the University and College Union. 

The bureaucracy hovers over the class struggle like the grim reaper, moving in to sabotage and strangle every strike. 

The Socialist Equality Party opposes those pseudo-left tendencies such as the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and Revolutionary Communist Party who claim mass pressure from below will force the trade union officials to fight and lead opposition to the Labour government’s cuts. Faced with opposition from below, the union apparatus will only deepen its collusion with Starmer, the state apparatus and corporate management.

The incomes of leading union officials such as Graham, Kebede and Ward place them in the top five percent of income earners. To preserve their privileged existence as partners of the Starmer government and big business is their sole priority. 

The working class must strike out on a new road, break the grip of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and build new organisations of class struggle—rank-and-file committees. This will enable workers to coordinate their struggles across workplaces, industries and even national boundaries, to share information and organise resistance to the dictates of the global financial oligarchy and its plundering of society’s wealth. The SEP is fighting to build a new socialist and revolutionary leadership in the working class fight for this.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/18/nrmz-a18.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.