TOMORROW’S mega picket in Birmingham, organised by Strike Map in support of the striking bin workers, shows the breadth of solidarity they have won across the trade union movement.

With Birmingham City Council trying everything to undermine Unite’s strike, from injunctions to strike-breaking agency labour, that could not be more important.

This dispute epitomises the divide-and-rule strategy of Britain’s ruling class in two respects.

First, it is an attempt to resolve the local government funding crisis by lowering pay.

That local government funding crisis is not Birmingham-specific, nor purely the result of the council’s equal pay liability.

As Kate Taylor, the activist who helped found the Brum, Rise Up! alliance to fight the commissioner-imposed solution to Birmingham Council’s bankruptcy (£300 million cuts in two years with an eye-watering 21 per cent rise in council tax) pointed out at that group’s launch, one in five British councils are predicted to go bankrupt and fully half are in “significant financial distress.”

This is the legacy of the savage assault on local government finances by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition beginning 15 years ago. It slashed central funding for councils by 40 per cent; real-terms local government funding is down by a fifth in 2024-25 compared to 2010-11.

It is the legacy too of the wider devastation wrought by Tory “austerity.”

Councils face hugely increased bills for adult social care, linked to the failure of politics at national level to address a crisis with its roots not just in an ageing population but in the societal atomisation and community dislocation born of almost half a century of Thatcherism.

Other costs have rocketed too, down to soaring energy prices or the shocking rise in homelessness since 2010. Councils, deprived of steady income from council housing rents after years of sell-offs, are forced to put up those made homeless through the resulting housing crisis in expensive temporary accommodation.

Birmingham is the biggest local authority in Europe.

If it succeeds in balancing its books by cutting pay and services, that model will then be rolled out across Britain.

The state’s divide-and-rule strategy is posed even more starkly by the narrative that bin workers’ wages must be cut if the council is to afford equal pay settlements for majority-women occupations.

So-called austerity has hit workers with the longest wage squeeze since the Napoleonic wars, arrested but not reversed by the post-Covid strike wave and last year’s public-sector settlements. The cause of women’s equality is not served by cutting the income of working-class families.

If equal pay means levelling down, not levelling up, then the working class is losing, not winning.

That’s besides the huge political risk of associating equal pay campaigns with a reduction of pay and services overall, which feeds into Reform UK’s effort to portray equalities legislation as an elitist con-trick.

This is not, ultimately, a dispute that can be resolved with Birmingham City Council alone. The council’s cuts are dictated by government-appointed commissioners, and it is in the gift of central government to resolve this dispute without cutting pay.

Its refusal to do so indicates that — red rosette or no — it is a fundamentally anti-working class government. Small wonder that Unite has voted to reconsider its entire relationship with Labour.

If the party’s biggest affiliate walks away, it would mark a milestone on Labour’s long goodbye as the party of the organised working class.

What is certain is that a defeat for the bin strikers would be a defeat for the entire class, whose implications for Labour’s future pale beside the licence it would give for yet another full-frontal assault on pay and conditions nationwide.

They need to win. At tomorrow’s mega picket, our whole movement is broadcasting that message.