Unite has voted to suspend the membership of the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, and reconsider its ties with Labour over the party’s approach to the Birmingham bin workers’ strike.
Labour’s biggest union donor passed the motion at its policy conference on Friday, although party sources said Rayner had resigned her membership of Unite some months ago.
The motion is a sign of how bad relations have become between Labour and Unite over the dispute about pay and conditions, which the union says would impose pay cuts of £8,000 on some workers.
Bin workers in Birmingham have been striking since January and walked out indefinitely in March, leading to piles of rubbish building up on the city’s streets.
Unite’s move against Rayner appeared to be largely symbolic given the deputy prime minister had already cancelled her membership payments, although she was still recorded as being a member of Unite on the last list of ministerial interests published on 29 May.
However, the threat to cut or further reduce financial ties with Labour could be deeply damaging for the party at a time when it needs to maintain healthy funds to fight off the threats of Reform and the Conservatives.
The Unite general secretary, Sharon Graham, accused Labour-led Birmingham council of carrying out action similar to “fire and rehire” as striking workers were being replaced by agency workers and faced the possibility of redundancy.
“Unite is crystal clear it will call out bad employers regardless of the colour of their rosette,” she said. “Angela Rayner has had every opportunity to intervene and resolve this dispute but has instead backed a rogue council that has peddled lies and smeared its workers fighting huge pay cuts.
“The disgraceful actions of the government and a so-called Labour council, is essentially fire-and-rehire and makes a joke of the Employment Relations Act promises. People up and down the country are asking whose side is the Labour government on and coming up with the answer: not workers.”
Rayner, who is still a member of the Unison trade union, is considered an ally of the unions within Labour and pushed through the party’s package of workers’ rights in the face of opposition from big business.
However, Unite is one of the unions that feel the government betrayed its members in Birmingham, and has also been campaigning with other unions against winter fuel allowance and other benefit cuts.
The Unite motion, which was passed overwhelmingly, said the union was prepared to discuss its relationship with Labour if Birmingham council forced through the redundancies of striking workers.
It suggests Unite could be ready to end hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding for Labour if it severed or suspended its long relationship with the party. Unite gave about £2m to Labour in the year before the election.
It has scaled back its financial support in recent years, with Unison now contributing more, but it is historically the party’s biggest union backer having given more than £70m raised from its members.
The union also voted to suspend the membership of John Cotton, the Labour leader of Birmingham council, who on Wednesday said the council was at the “absolute limit of what we can offer”. The council has not said what its next steps would be but it said this week that it needed to proceed with changes to its services without delay, as the latest round of talks ended without resolution.
Unite’s dispute is with Birmingham city council, but since 2023 the local authority’s finances and governance have been overseen by government-appointed commissioners who are ultimately answerable to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
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A Labour source said: “Birmingham city council are independent employers, and the the government is, rightly, not a party in this dispute.
“The deputy prime minister has introduced the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in decades which will deliver for 15 million workers across the country.”
A No 10 spokesperson said of the strike that the government’s priority has always been Birmingham residents.
There are still issues with uncollected rubbish in Birmingham, although the situation has improved since late March, when the council declared a major incident over the mountains of bin bags on the streets.
In May, the council secured a court order preventing striking bin workers on the picket line from delaying bin lorries leaving depots, which was one of their tactics to ensure the strike had the most impact.
Many regular bin collections have since resumed, with the lorries being staffed by agency workers. But parts of the city, particularly more deprived areas, still have piles of waste in the street, with the smell being exacerbated by the hot weather.
Recycling bin collections in the city of more than a million people have been suspended since early February, with residents told to take their recycling waste to the tip or store it at home. In reality, many people have put it in their general waste bin, with growing concern about the environmental impact of this as the strike drags on.
