July 2025 minutes

2025 minutes 0

Wolverhampton, Bilston & District Trades Union Council

Delegate Minutes Thursday 17th July 2025

Present online: (delegates in bold): Michael Vaughan UNISON Staffordshire, Nick Kelleher, John Oakley, Tom Mohan, Keely Hodgkiss UNITE WM/6150; Marie Taylor UNITE LE/372; Kieran Bott UCU Wolverhampton University, Dane Cross, Peter Kibblewhite UNITE WM7132, Ali Rahimi UNITE WM5115, Matt Reid UNITE WM/7186, Simon Cardy UNISON City of Wolverhampton, Sonia Wikins UNISON Acute, Shahin Ahktar UNITE, Phillipa Webster UNISON
Apologies: Penny Welch, Tim Martin, Clare Dhillon, John Clarke

  1. Minutes of last Delegate Meeting (June) agreed & no Matters Arising
  2. EC Report and urgent correspondence
  1. Our letter writing campaign to the council at the end of last year regarding their aggressive pursuance of any missed council tax monthly payments, demanding full yearly payment may have paid off. Despite initial rejection of our claims, the latest demand letters seemed to be less threatening.
  2. Discussion on way forward from last month’s discussion on trade union response to Reform. To request meeting with local labour parties to see if we can agree a strategy before future elections. Also link up with Hope not Hate.
  3. 18th September meeting on Future of Education; MT confirmed NASUWT, NK to invite UCU and NEU.
  4. NEU affiliation and UNITE WM/5203 affiliation fee received. Re-affiliations outstanding: RMT, UCU University, CWU.
  5. Agricultural implement production for enslavement research project launch meeting planned for September
  6. TUC Development grant £300 for May Day outstanding; UNITE WM7132 £100 promised; WB&DTUC donation £250 paid; seek further £233.56 from UNISON City of Wolverhampton to underwrite.
  7. Workers Memorial Day stone – Wilkinsons have been contacted with stone examples
  8. Friday 25 July 6am-10am – Call to support the UNITE Birmingham bin strikers – co-ordinate Wolverhampton delegates to Perry Barr depot picket B42 2TU – closest to Wolverhampton https://strikemap.org/strikes/396783some delegates will also be going on Wed 23rd July to Perry Barr picket. Tory government appointed Commissioners at labour Birmingham Co are getting £1,100 and more per day each.
  9. Chainmakers £50 donation agreed to Midlands TUC – threat to future of festival due to lack of funding. Branches urged to donate see https://support-the-women-chainmakers-festival.raiselysite.com/
  10. a letter was sent to local MPs from Executive echoing PSC’s call not to proscribe Palestine Action; we had no replies; now proscribed.
  1. delegate reports:
    UCU – KB said slow restructuring is ongoing at the university
    UNISON – MV reported local government pay deal seems settled after consultative pay ballot. Reform led Staffordshire council is currently quiet. Membership continues up due to fears of future. Unison linking up nationally on issues. New NEC is more aligned to general secretary.
    UNITE – national policy conference suspended Angela Raynor MP and Bham Co leader John cotton from membership over their handing of bin strike. TM reported pay deal agreed at ArcelorMittal.
  2. Midlands TUC EC report was circulated but there were additional union updates, but again no UNITE present to update on Birmingham bin strike:
    ASLEF – industrial; action at Hull trains ongoing over driver dismissal.
    CWU – pay deal at Royal mail; 2nd class to reduce to 3 deliveries/week; restructuring of their regional structure, cutting from 10 to 5 regions to be in line with TUC/LP.
    GMB – after 4 years of an equal pay dispute there is still no settlement and a ballot for potential strike.
    MU – meeting with Combined Authority to secure creative rights for work used in Artificial Intelligence.
    UCU – indicative ballots for industrial actions at several universities in Midlands over redundancies.
    UNISON – Notts University Hospital Trust strike 15 days since jan then last 2 weeks and a further 4 weeks planned over failure to pay for duties worked over grades during Covid pandemic.
  3. Secretary report circulated
  4. Wolverhampton Palestine Solidarity Campaign Simon Cardy gave a report:

You know, just when you think things can’t get any worse, it does. I mean, in the news today, the UN confirmed that a total of 674 Palestinians have been killed at food distribution centres, since they were set up by the American contractors in May. The staggering figure, just just to put a bit of context on that, there are 4 so-called humanitarian food centres, three of them are in the South and one is in the middle. And that compares with 400 United Nations food distribution centres before they were all closed down.

So I think you know it’s quite a yet another staggering statistic. The other main thing that’s happening on the ground, of course, is the Rafa plan, which is effectively a concentration camp. More and more people are including the UN and prepared to describe it as that it involves.

Slicing up a strip of land around Rafa, which is on the Egyptian border where the expectation is that Israelis are calling it a humanitarian city.

Everybody else is calling it a concentration camp, but effectively it will be a holding centre for mass exportation. So once you’re in, you won’t be able to leave; unless you volunteer to be deported to another country. Not that any of that bit of the plan has taken place. So anybody else that doesn’t go into the holding centre concentration camp will be regarded as a legitimate target.

And I suspect it will get worse because nothing seems to be moving the Israeli Government to do anything other than what they plan to go ahead with, and the complicity continues, particularly around our government. A little bit of light with some of our MPs, that 59, I think it was of our MPs, signed an open letter calling to recognise Palestine as a state. So there is pressure building. 59 MPs is not an insignificant number and although. None of our three Wolverhampton MPs were amongst them. Which may not be surprising, although I have to say that Warinder Juss has shifted his position a little bit more favourably in recent weeks. He has said openly in the House Commons in. A couple of debates he has called for recognition of the state of Palestine. He has called for the total arms ban of all military weaponry licences. The prescription of a direct action protest group; there were just 22 MPs voted against it.

I think it’s very early days. It is clearly designed to have a chilling effect. Some police forces have taken it to the point where there’s a video being circulated on social media and it was reported in the Guardian today that Kent Police armed police threatened the sole protester on a roundabout just outside Canterbury with arrest under the Terrorism Act simply for displaying a Palestinian flag.

In other parts of the country where people have openly expressed support for a proscribed organisation, police have taken no action and I had a report yesterday that a Wolverhampton person on social media posted support for a proscribed organisation then went into Bilston Street police station to report it and they weren’t interested.

So you’re getting quite a wide range of support, but I think the view is that they don’t need to take out everybody that will express support for a proscribed organisation. They will target selected people and it will have this sort of chilling effect.; which to some extent has already happened. I mean, the protest against prescription on the Thursday of the boat, which is just over a week ago now, the police had refused to have the demonstration had to be moved up to the end to the start of Trafalgar Square. I think now that clearly wouldn’t have happened.

And the argument from the Met was that the MPs would feel intimidated.

So you’re beginning to see all sorts of chilling effects. The Wolverhampton Facebook page, Wolverhampton Palestine edited campaign Facebook page has twice had posts taken down by Meta prior to prescription, one was advertising the PSC lobby of parliament. That’s not been reinstated and the other was to call on MPs to vote against prescription. That was taken down but reinstated after appeal.

I mean, those are small things, but it gives you a kind of range of flavour of some of the things. But I think it’s kind of still a bit early days yet, but it is designed to have this chilling effect.

Locally, we’ve had a few events. We had one outside Barclays and we had the 5th protest inside the public gallery of Wolverhampton Pension Committee pressing for divestments and the arms industry in particular the pension fund and West Midlands. The pension committee and the chair’s sort of response to the campaign is just to completely ignore us. But what is worth reporting is that we now have 3 W Midlands councils who have explicitly passed a motion or said that they would call on the West Midlands Pension fund to divest from the arms industry. Obviously that includes Palestine and the Israeli arms to Palestine too.

Sandwell Council passed a motion. In February, Dudley passed a very good motion which was unanimously supported. Not sorry, not unanimously supported. It had half a dozen votes against, but it had cross party support, a Lib Dem motion I think, but the Labour Group supported it; the independants supported it and then last month, you know to my surprise, the Birmingham Labour Group issued a statement calling for divestment from the arms industry in the pension fund, so you know, and I know Coventry Labour Group are considering it. They haven’t made that step yet, but I know discussions are taking place inside the Coventry Labour Group so you know campaign supporting we’ve got two other councils have passed pro Palestinian motions namely Coventry and Walsall over the last seven or eight months or so.

PSC’s response to this repression is basically our best response is to carry on doing what we’re doing and if anything try and escalate matters so there will be another London demonstration on Saturday. There’s still a few places on the coach available.

Co-op supermarket has also agreed that Co-op branches will not stock Israeli goods so that is significant.

PSC are planning a big national demonstration outside an RAF base on the 16th of August, so we will be mode trying to mobilise for that event, so the focus is campaigning and to try and concentrate more a bit on the arms industry and push that forward.

MV reported he sits as UNISON observer on Staffordshire LG Pension committee and they too have had protests. Groups have a petition of over 1,300 and the committee is expected to debate divestment if it exceeds 2,000.

  1. any other business none

@8pm UNITE Birmingham Bin workers strike update by Matt Reid, Unite lead shop steward:

It was 2023 that Birmingham City Council identified an £850 million potentially equal pay claim that basically led the Council to effective bankruptcy. Seven Commissioners were introduced by Michael Gove to basically oversee the running of the Council and make sure he was. It was terrible, it was basically, if you wanted a pack of paper clips, you had to go to a spend board, it was that bad.

They were that controlling, we didn’t see anything about anything affecting our service on in waste until 2024, towards the end where they put in a 188 notice to delete our Grade 3 worker role, which was like a leading hand at the back of the vehicle, in a safety critical role.

They began a 45 day consultation. Now that’s when I became Convener two weeks into the consultation. It was a sham consultation, a predetermined outcome. They knew what they wanted to do. That was the role that they believed was the equal Pay claim, they told the drivers that they would not be affected by this Council and by this consultation in any way and they would maintain their grade, so they were trying to divide us all the way through and we got to the end of the consultation period which they offered VR.

A lateral move to see another grade three position somewhere in the Council, or accept a grade to load the role with a pay cut of £8,000 a year, which is when most of I think there were 180 affected members and at that worker level grade three and they went down. I think we’ve gone down some left on VR and about we have 90 left now that a grade two. My problem was that we had three depots Atlas, Lifford Lane and Perry Barr. My problem was that all three workplace reps; they had one workplace Rep at each depot; they were all grade threes and they all took their VR.

So we had to ballot our members with me being a convener with no reps. We got volunteers together who wanted to be reps and were voted in. I think that they were voted in 16 days before industrial action was due to begin. They had no time for any training. No. I’ve got massive respect for all of them that they have. None of them have done a disciplinary, but they’ve led a picket line for six months now. It’s absolutely tremendous. We did a staggered start for three months with the work to rule, so we started one day a week, then moved to two, then three all the time we were in the workplace, we were working to rule, but then four months ago, on the 11th of March, we just had to do it, we just went all out strike. Then we believed. Then we started walking the walk.

Organisers came down and they explained to us the Ziegler rule where you can’t block vehicles, but you can delay for a reasonable amount of time, which we stretched to its very limits of slowly walking in front of the vehicles as they left the depots.

Then the Council put pressure on the police, and so did the Labour government to enforce Section 14 of the Public Order Act. Basically, they put up zones around the entrances to the depot, saying that we couldn’t walk vehicles out. If we did, we’d be arrested. They got very heavy-handed. At that point, the police did and there were quite a few scuffles. We’ll put it that way.

The police could not maintain the Section 14 state because there were so many of us on picket lines they needed a large number of police every day. I think it is believed it cost the bill for the police was 1,800 officers over 11 weeks and he cost over £1,000,000 in overtime but they couldn’t maintain it. So they had to pull back from the Section 14, which was our chance to get to stop the vehicles again. But the Council declared a Major Incident as soon as we did and they put in for an injunction, which is the injunction is in place now, but we’ve found a way around it. We stopped the vehicles outside the injunction zone. Now we put vehicles in certain key positions to make vehicles turn certain ways so we can sort of lead them to us and then we start a big convoy of vehicles outside of the injunction zone, which they’ll probably expand against. So we’ll have to rethink that.

During all this, a Labour government came into power and we thought, great, that’s it. The Labour government will save us and Angela Rayner came down to Birmingham and we were all excited until we saw in the press that she was visiting scab agency staff who were doing the clear up on the back and didn’t visit one picket line, didn’t speak to one striking worker, and then just reiterated what Birmingham City Council’s were saying, that a reasonable offer had been made.

Now I’ve been in every single negotiation from the start of regional level to sitting next to Sharon Graham across from the Managing director of Birmingham City Council. Now, they’ve said from the start that the Managing director was the decision maker, but it’s been released in the press recently that Commissioners have signed off on everything. So they’ve said that they’re not in charge, but the Commissioners were in charge. They needed a five week break to go and discuss with the Commissioners what was possible then they just came back and said no. So we just wasted all this time, all that taxpayer money, all that disruption to the people of Birmingham with no real negotiation taking place.

We’re in this position now where they’ve made another 188 notice and a 45 day consultation for the delineation of the driver team leader role. So our driver team leaders are grade four and they’re stating that the strikes taught them, using agency staff, they don’t need the driver team leader role. So rather than following the evaluation process like every other job in the Council, they’ve decided to just, you know, naturally delete the driver team leader role and create a new driver role at grade three. And this would cause a loss to 127 members of £8,000 to £10,000 a year and that’s people losing homes. That’s rents, it’s school fees, it’s everything, it’s just massive, it’s a quarter of their wages gone. I think there’d be six months pay protection. That’s it.

So we’ve moved on because we now need to come out in the press, that the Commissioners are basically the shock calls and they’re controlled by central government and Angela Rayner. So now we’ve moved away from talking to the Council.

Angela Rayner and John Cotton, the leader of the Birmingham Labour Group and leader of the Council, have been suspended from Unite and there was a vote at conference that we’re going to look into our relationship to donate into the Labour Party. That’s the situation we’re in at the moment.

Matt answered questions and delegates agreed a £100 donation and message of support.