I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but I think we have a much-needed bit of good news. The binmen of Leeds have essentially won their six-week strike over pay, shift patterns and jobs. I say “essentially”, because as I write union negotiators are putting the finishing touches to a deal that removes the imposition of salary cuts of up to 30 per cent and takes the threat of privatisation of the refuse collection service off the table.
In return, they have to work an extra half hour and lose about the price of a pint from pay each week. The unions – Unison, the GMB and Unite – agreed the productivity deal in protracted talks with Leeds City Council bosses and it’s going out to ballot among the 600 “binners” who have been on strike since September 7.
This has been a model dispute. The ruling Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition served notice on the binmen that their pay would be cut from £19,000 to as little as £13,000, shift patterns would drastically altered without discussion, manning levels would be reduced and their wives would be sold to Arab slave traders. OK, I made that last bit up, but you get my drift. It was a truly draconian package of cuts.
Lib Dem council leader Richard Brett, clearly an innocent abroad in the world of industrial relations, didn’t expect a strike ballot. And then didn’t expect a “Yes” vote. He thought it wouldn’t happen. It did. He imagined the drivers would scab. Only one did. The strike was solid, disciplined and well-organised – despite historic union rivalry in the city – from day one. The public relations were professional, in contrast to the flabby nonsense put out by council spin-doctors. And public support was high, despite rubbish piling up in the streets that hired contractors failed to clear.
Brett, who picked up £45,883 in allowances last year, initially refused even to talk to the unions, faffing off to the annual Cleggfest in Bournemouth instead. A science teacher in civvy street, he may have been able to show who’s boss in the classroom, but he singularly failed to impose his authority on this dispute. After weeks of havering, he finally slunk back to the negotiating table.
The outcome is not quite a famous victory, but it’s the next best thing: a win on points. This was a political strike – by the employers. This could be the shape of things to come. Leeds council chiefs based their demand for pay cuts on their need to comply with the Equal Pay Act, even though Barbara Castle’s 1970 legislation was designed to improve the lot of women, not worsen the lot of men.
In any event, the Single Status Agreement, signed at national level in 1997 and supposed to be in place by 2007, phases in equal pay. Sixty per cent of councils have already done deals, including big authorities such as Birmingham and Nottingham.
So what changed in Leeds? Politics did. For the past two years, the council has been run by a weird rainbow coalition of Tories, Lib Dems and anyone else who can hop on the bandwagon. But crucially, the tin-pot town hall politicos take their cue from their party leaders. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are blowing the trumpet for big cuts in spending before the general election, to wrong-foot Labour’s strategy of spending our way out of the recession. If it can be done at local level, they argue, it should be done nationally.
In Leeds, they wrongly calculated that public opinion would back council bosses who cut savagely now and to hell with the consequences for the workers. Have they learned their lesson? City hall chiefs had drawn up secret plans (in the possession of your correspondent, naturally) to slash the council workforce by 20 per cent – 3,362 jobs – over the next five years in a £30 million economy programme.
The odds on this plan going back to the drawing board are rather higher, thanks to the bold binners. If I wore a hat, I’d take it off to them.
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And so to the calm of the Ilkley Literature Festival. If only…. Francis Beckett and David Hencke, authors of Marching To The Fault Line, a history of the miners’ strike of 1984/5, were in town to boost their book. And, rather to my surprise, they filled a hall in this ultra-respectable Dales community.
Also on stage were Peter Lazenby, veteran industrial correspondent of the Yorkshire Evening Post and co-contributor to Shafted, a book of essays on the strike and the media, Anne Scargill (wife of) and Betty Cook, a leading figure in Women Against Pit Closures.
It was quite obvious from an early stage that the lasses would steal the show, which they duly did, culminating in a magnificent rendition of “We Are Women, We Are Strong” that brought the audience to its feet. Anne Scargill’s story of her arrest on the picket line and humiliating (and clearly quite unnecessary) strip search by a WPC young enough to be her daughter revived the most painful memories of that civil war against the Tories.
It falls to the Becketts of this world to present a rational history of great events such as this, but I hope someone, somewhere, is doing a proper oral history out of the mouths of those who were there and suffered so much.
