Communist Vanguard attended the third ‘Megapicket’ in support of the Birmingham refuse workers striking over severe pay cuts and the removal of their Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO) roles. Across five sites, including three major depots, workers, comrades, and supporters gathered to demonstrate solidarity and continue the fight against the deepening of the refuse workers’ exploitation by Birmingham City council.
The defensive strike — ongoing since early 2025 — that was sparked by pay cuts of up to £8,000 and the removal of the WRCO role, a position essential to safe and efficient waste collection, is persisting across the city of Birmingham. The scale, duration, and militancy of the struggle make clear that this is not simply a workplace dispute, but a class confrontation.
The growing numbers on the picket lines and the strike’s longevity speak to this directly. Agency workers, initially brought in to undermine the action, have crossed the line to join it. Permanent workers, despite facing injunctions designed to intimidate and contain them, have continued to turn out in force.
This reveals the strike’s deeper character: workers recognising their shared position and prolonging their struggle collectively against intensifying exploitation. It has been notable not only for its length, but for what it demonstrates in practice, that workers can organise beyond the confines of traditional trade union control, while still drawing selective support from unions such as Unite.
On 30 January, rallies were held across multiple depots, with supporters aiming to block lorries and disrupt operations. Under sustained pressure, Birmingham City Council chose to close the depots altogether; yet the pickets went ahead regardless. Our organisation was designated to the Perry Barr depot, where these contradictions were particularly visible.
Strike Map, that aims to: document and present the levels of strike action in the country; enable others to see the levels of action and pass on messages of solidarity; encourage other workers in their struggles; and bring those leading struggles together through a network; coordinated the actions impressively, managing to spread hundreds of supporters from Birmingham and around the country over multiple picket sites.
On account of Unite the Union’s legal and political limits, the Megapicket went beyond what is typically possible when workers’ struggles are mediated by bourgeois leadership. Despite Unite’s support, the action demonstrated that workers can organise outside the framework of trade unionism itself, once they adopt a strategy that centres their own collective power, decision-making, and solidarity from below.
The most revealing feature of the day was the physical and political separation of workers from the rally itself. Workers who had previously blockaded the exit of scab lorries on previous pickets — and were subsequently served injunctions – were barred from gathering in front of the depot. They were also excluded from the main speaking area and omitted from the official speakers’ list, which was initially reserved for union officials and party representatives.
Our comrades intervened to challenge this arrangement, eventually supporting several workers in getting access to the microphone across from the depot. This exclusion highlighted a core contradiction: while the struggle was about the workers, and while Strike Map’s independent coordination was significant, the organisation of the rally initially sidelined the very people at its centre. This experience underscores the necessity of centring workers in their own struggles, a foundational principle of the United Front from Below.
The United Front from Below means uniting workers across unions, industries, and political backgrounds around a shared struggle fought explicitly in the interests of the working class as a whole. Unlike union leaderships that routinely align themselves with the priorities of the British state, organised workers themselves are the only force capable of mounting a sustained challenge to exploitation.
For us, the Birmingham bin strikes present an urgent and vital opportunity: to express solidarity with workers demonstrating militancy, to learn and refine practical organising tactics, to expand networks of struggle, and to advance the strategy of the United Front from Below in a material way. This urgency is sharpened by the council’s current escalation. Birmingham City Council is now seeking to ban Megapickets through injunctions, turning to the courts to suppress mass worker solidarity. This is not an anomaly, but a familiar response. It is the state intervening when workers organise beyond institutional limits.
In this context, it becomes clear that what is required is a strategy capable of uniting workers in Birmingham and beyond; one that refuses legal intimidation, rejects bourgeois leadership, and consciously builds power from below. Whist organising in unions is necessary, this kind of orientation will not come from the existing trade union structures. It must be built outside of them, by conscious, militant, and vanguard workers: those who are ready to fight inside their unions and also forge links across them.
Communist Vanguard stands firmly in solidarity with the Birmingham refuse workers and commits to advancing the struggle wherever possible.