Last week the SKWAWKBOX covered the breakdown of talks between Birmingham City Council (BCC) and the Unite and Unison unions, over the council’s failure to engage meaningfully with the unions’ unhappiness at a ‘bad faith’ payment to workers who did not participate in their successful 2017 strike – which was also triggered by bad faith on the part of BCC.

Unite announced that it would be escalating its industrial action because of the ‘declaration of war’ by the council on its own employees.

The union has scheduled ten days of strike action as follows:

Tue 19th Feb Fri 22nd Feb Wed 27th Feb Thurs 28th Feb Mon 4th March Fri 8th March Tues 12th March

Wed 13th March

Thurs 21st March

Fri 22nd March

The council was accused last month by its own waste-management cabinet member of engineering the failure of refuse-collection services in order to privatise them. The cabinet member resigned in protest at BCC’s behaviour.

SKWAWKBOX comment:

BCC could easily have avoided this action, but chose to ignore a letter from the unions asking for information relating to the payment to non-striking workers. It chose instead to ignore it and has now failed to engage properly in Acas mediation.



Birmingham residents are paying the price. It’s time the city had a Labour council that acted like one.

The SKWAWKBOX needs your support. This blog is provided free of charge but depends on the generosity of its readers to be viable. If you can afford to, please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here for a monthly donation via GoCardless. Thanks for your solidarity so this blog can keep bringing you information the Establishment would prefer you not to know about.

If you wish to reblog this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.

Like this: Like Loading...