Around 30 protesters, including representatives from Birmingham Against the Cuts, gathered at Sparkhill Job centre because Ian Duncan-Smith – tory minister for work and pensions (DWP) was paying a visit. The tory cuts will affect job centres directly, with threatened redundancies, and indirectly with rising unemployment increasing their workload.
Two articles online at Birmingham Mail today about the refuse workers strike:
Birmingham City Council blames bins backlog on triple whammy
A TRIPLE whammy of strike action, snow and the regular Christmas increase in waste food and packaging has left Birmingham’s refuse collection service overwhelmed and piles of black bags in the streets
and
Birmingham binmen strike: Readers have their say
A mixture of supportive and not so supportive letters from Mail readers, and I would imagine letters will continue to come into the newspaper about the strike and it’s aftermath.
letters@birminghammail.net is their email address.
The local media coverage of the strike shows that it is having a noticeable effect. In the first article, Kevin Mitchell – Assistant director of fleet and waste management – said
he recognised that the unions, Unite, GMB, Unison and UCATT, had timed their industrial action to perfection and caused maximum disruption to the service.
“The unions’ action was strategically spot on,” he said.
We hope the strike and work to rule actions prove as effective in ensuring the council meet the unions demands as they have been in generating local news coverage.
Filed under Cuts, Events, Media/Press, News, strike
Birmingham Against The Cuts 