Birmingham home care workers to strike

Privatised NHS workers employed by Care UK in Doncaster striking against cuts, photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge)

Birmingham Socialist Party

On 20 February, Birmingham home care staff will be taking strike action against their employer Birmingham council - a Labour council.

The Blairite Birmingham council is making quite a name for itself having only recently suffered a defeat to the Birmingham bin workers after their 12-week strike action which brought down the then council leader John Clancy. Now other council workers are taking a fight to its doors.

The strike is over changes to the home carers' working patterns where they will have to work three split shifts during the day: 7am-10am, 12pm-2pm and 4pm-10pm.

These home care workers are lone workers travelling from their homes to the service users' houses, many by public transport, to provide six weeks of care for people who have just left hospital.

These unrealistic and exhausting working patterns will become a barrier to many of the workers who will no doubt be forced to leave their jobs.

These new patterns are just one of many ways the Labour council is unravelling its social care for the people of Birmingham, a city with a population of 1.1 million.

In 2010 there was a social care workforce of over 7,000 compared to less than 2,000 today, with the council looking to make a further 40% of the home care staff redundant.

By continuing to run the service into the ground it will make it easier for the council to scrap the care altogether and leave the local community to depend on the private sector - a sector which is profit driven at the expense of both the workers and service users.

Fight for funding

Unison, which has balloted the home carers, rightly points out that central government has cut the funding for local councils but the union fails to place blame at the local Labour council too.

After the massive backing of Corbyn's anti-austerity manifesto in last summer's general election, local Labour councils are in a better position, now more than ever, to fight against austerity and refuse to carry out a single cut.

They would have the backing of the local community, workers and trade unions. Yet what does Birmingham council do? It does the Tories' bidding and carrys out devastating cuts without putting up the tiniest bit of fight.

In the 1980s, Militant, the Socialist Party's predecessor, had city councillors in Liverpool who defied Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher and refused to implement cuts.

Instead they fought for more funding from central government, built council houses and created jobs.

It would not be hard for Birmingham council to do the same and potentially topple the current weak and divided Tory government, yet this is unlikely to happen while the council is a Blairite stronghold following the same ideology as the Tories.

Birmingham home carers will be striking from 11am to 2.30pm on Saturday 20 January with a strike rally being held outside Birmingham council house at 12pm.

The strike will be seen as more than just about their working patterns but also a fight to defend public services and the service users they care for.

This version of this article was first posted on the Socialist Party website on 16 January 2018 and may vary slightly from the version subsequently printed in The Socialist.

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