After six months of continuous strike action the Coventry Bin Dispute ended last month. It was the longest strike in Unite’s history, and by virtue of this alone it is historically significant. It garnered a huge amount of media attention, mainly focusing on the fact that it was a dispute between Unite and a Labour council. Most coverage presented the strike as principally a struggle between Sharon Graham and Keir Starmer. However this was, by some distance, the least interesting aspect of the dispute.
The course of this dispute demonstrated many of the structural problems that confront workers seeking to improve their pay or conditions. The main structural flaws in this dispute were the process of deciding public sector pay, the quixotic nature of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, and the role of a Local Authority Trading Company (a company owned by a council) in providing services to the council via a Teckal exemption.
One of the main issues with public sector pay is that it is decided based on a flawed notion of skill. This often boils down to assessing arbitrary job descriptions rather than evaluating the utility of the actual work itself. The result of this is that even when there is a labour shortage, it is harder for “Low-skilled” workers to leverage their market position for better pay and conditions as public sector pay structures constrain workers’ bargaining potential.
The situation is further complicated by equality legislation. Though, despite what Rishi Sunak says, the 2010 Equality Act is a net force for good, it can hinder pay negotiations. Theoretically, one group of workers who share a pay grade with another group of workers who are doing a separate job in the public sector, (for instance waste workers and catering staff) can put in an equal pay claim if the other group of workers receive a pay rise and they do not. Though this is often more nuanced in practice, equality legislation can be just as useful to the employer in public sector pay disputes than it is to the employee in other areas.
Consequently, Unite could not simply ask for a pay rise on behalf of its Coventry refuse workers. It had to go through a job-evaluation process to demonstrate that the work done by its members required more skill than that of their grade and was instead the grade above. Since there was no agreement between Unite and the council, this meant taking the dispute to ACAS.
As with equality legislation, ACAS is often useful for resolving disputes in favour of workers, but can be misused, as happened in this dispute. Onay Kasab, Unite’s lead officer in the dispute, said that the ACAS process was “A botch”, because the Unite members who attended the ACAS meetings were not listened to and that Unite felt the process was one sided. ACAS’s failure to agree with the re-evaluation claim shows how the arbitration system can fail workers as it meant that Unite had to look for another mechanism to justify the proposed rise in their members’ pay, despite being adamant that the case for a job re-evaluation was, and remains, perfectly valid.
While workers were still on strike, the council brought in agency labour from Tom White Waste to attempt to mitigate the impact of the strike. Tom White Waste is an LATC owned by the council, meaning that the council are ultimately responsible for the running of the company, and three of the council’s officers are listed as directors at the company. To many observers this would appear a conflict of interest.
Ironically for the council, it was the use of Tom White Waste that proved their undoing in the dispute. A community campaign, that the council allege was connected to Unite but Unite insist was a separate group, staged several protests outside the premises of other businesses using the Tom White Waste service. The result of this was that these businesses cancelled their contract with Tom White Waste, causing a significant loss of revenue to the company and, by extension, the council.
The outcome of the subsequent negotiations was that, although the waste workers currently remain on Grade Five (as the lack of agreement over the job grading means that the workers remain on this grade by default) from the 1st of September, they will receive four extra increments for being available to work Saturdays (which Kasab said they already work). Saturday work is voluntary and the rota for it will be self-managed by the workforce; equally, the increments do not include the individual payment for working a given Saturday. The result of the agreed increments is that the striking workers have a 12.9% pay rise and are now paid £31,895. If the members had started on the bottom of the grade above theirs, they would have received £29,174, although there would have been more opportunity for eventual pay progression by advancing to the top of the grade. As well as this, there is also the option of a £4,000 lump sum payment should any of the workers opt to work Christmas, which given the rising energy prices is not to be underestimated.
The length and course of the Coventry dispute showcases the structural obstacles that confront workers and organised labour. It also demonstrates the flawed coverage of industrial disputes. Coventry was briefly a national news item, but the main media focus was that it was a confrontation with a Labour council. Many news outlets only covered the dispute as Unite vs Labour, Graham vs Starmer before eventually ceasing coverage of it altogether.
This did not bother Sharon Graham who, when asked about the spike and subsequent fall in media coverage, told me that “If our plans are based just on column inches then we will fail”, before expanding that she felt the dispute demonstrated why “It is really important that unions don’t transfer industrial power for political promises”. Indeed, given that this dispute highlights the imbalance of power between workers and institutions it is little wonder that Graham has spoken of the need for a “strikes plus” approach and emphasised that, in any dispute, it is important to “follow the money” as too often, striking is not sufficient. This appears to be working as so far Unite have won three hundred disputes under Graham and she estimates that she has been personally involved in approximately two hundred of them. This number will only increase in the immediate future, media coverage of disputes like this one however, are less likely to improve any time soon.