Ministers “have their fingers in their ears” over the ongoing Birmingham bin strikes, the boss of one of Britain’s biggest unions has said.
The prime minister and Angela Rayner must “get in the room, sort it out and stop letting this continue for no reason”, Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, has warned.
She said she is not the prime minister’s “favourite trade union leader… probably because I call things out”.
But, with the bin strikes running since January, Ms Graham called for Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy to resolve the dispute. The strikes have resulted in huge piles of rubbish across Birmingham as well as rat infestations and unsanitary conditions.
The union leader has been increasingly critical of Labour’s time in government in recent weeks, and Unite is re-examining its relationship with the Labour party with disaffiliation a real prospect.
The union also took the incendiary step this month of voting to suspend Ms Rayner’s membership over the strikes, with Ms Graham accusing her of failing to back workers. Ms Rayner had resigned her membership some months earlier.
“Angela Rayner has had every opportunity to intervene and resolve this dispute, but has instead backed a rogue council that has peddled lies and smeared its workers fighting huge pay cuts,” Ms Graham said this month.
And, doubling down in an interview with The Times, she called for a major change of course from Labour.
“People were voting for hope,” she said after Labour’s first year in power. “They are not voting for despair, are they?”
Ms Graham said she has been “in more government rooms than I’ve had hot dinners in the last year”, but that “getting a hearing and being listened to are two very different things”.
She warned that if Sir Keir and Ms Rayner keep “attacking workers” then she would be happy to pull the union’s backing of Labour, which would deal a major financial blow to the party.
“Is there something to be said for an authentic voice for workers, independent, strong unions, where your first, second and third priority is the workers?” she told The Times.
She added that, if Unite had voted on whether to abandon its link to Labour, it would have passed “without a shadow of a doubt”.
But, with hopes her pressure on the party will force a rethink in Downing Street, she said “we’ve got time to recoup this”.
“They’ve been in for a year. They’ve made some errors but there’s no point going further and faster when you’re heading for a cliff. They have time to address some of this stuff, but they’re going to have to move fast,” Ms Graham said.
She added: “I think if we’re here at the end of next year in the same position, I think there’s a real problem.”
Ms Graham was also a vocal critic of the government’s decision to scrap winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners. Despite the U-turn, she said there are older people who will now never vote Labour again.
A Labour Party spokesperson said: “The Labour government has introduced the biggest upgrade in workers’ rights in a generation to address low pay, insecure work, and poor working conditions, which will benefit 15 million workers across the country. Only Labour is delivering the change working people voted for and so deserve.”
