Buses, bins and ballots: the disputes still running this autumn

Industrial action hasn’t slowed down for autumn. Buses, trains, bins and now the NHS are all mid-dispute at once, several of them running for months with no settlement in sight – and the legal ground underneath all of them is shifting fast as the Employment Rights Act rolls out. Here’s where each of these stands, and what it adds up to.

Buses: a win, and a new front

As we reported in Left Field, the London bus dispute that’s been running most of the summer is over. Arriva North London drivers, based at garages across Barking, Edmonton, Enfield and beyond, walked out repeatedly from mid-August over in-cab temperatures soaring past 40C with no adequate air-conditioning. This month, Unite and Transport for London reached a deal which includes air-con fitted across the fleet by May 2027 and a commitment that any vehicle with a broken cooling system is fixed before it goes back into service. Unite’s Onay Kasab called it “an excellent win” for members who stood on picket lines through the hottest weeks of the year. It’s a reminder that a dispute framed by operators as unaffordable can still be settled on the union’s terms when the workforce holds firm.

A newer front has opened at the manufacturing end. Workers at the Alexander Dennis bus factory in Scarborough are taking industrial action that’s now delaying delivery of 200 new buses ordered for Liverpool. Worth watching, not least because it’s a different kind of leverage – not drivers striking over conditions on the road, but the workforce building the vehicles in the first place.

Rail: EMR’s strike suspended, but the dispute isn’t settled

The RMT’s dispute with East Midlands Railway, running through the summer as weekend strikes and action short of strike over faults on the Class 810 fleet, was heading for fixed strike dates of 16 and 17 September. That action has now been suspended, with the union confirming “substantial movement from management” only this week, and EMR says it will run a full timetable on both days while talks continue. It’s not a resolution though and action short of strike remains in place from 20 September if unsolicited brake applications occur to stop a train. RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey struck a wary note even in welcoming the pause, saying members “will remain vigilant in the fight for safety”. The union’s underlying complaint – that EMR has been running trains with a “significant number” of faults, including loss of communication between drivers, dispatchers and trackside systems – hasn’t gone away; it’s just being argued at the negotiating table for now rather than on the picket line. 

Bins: Birmingham’s dispute turns 18 months old

Birmingham’s refuse workers have now been in dispute with the council for a year and a half, since March 2025, over the scrapping of the waste recycling and collection officer role and pay cuts of up to £8,000 for affected staff. Unite members have voted repeatedly to extend the strike mandate, most recently through to this autumn. There’s still no negotiated settlement.

What’s changed is the price tag. A council report put the cost of trying to break the strike, rather than settle it, at £33.4m and Unite says that figure is still likely to understate the true cost. That’s public money being spent defeating a group of low-paid council workers rather than meeting demands the union says are worth a fraction of the sum. It’s the clearest test case going of what happens when a council chooses confrontation over settlement, and it’s still not resolved.

Health: the doctors’ dispute isn’t over either

Resident doctors’ long-running fight over pay looked closer to settled in June, when members accepted a government offer worth an average 6.6% uplift by April 2027, alongside substantive contracts for locally employed doctors to address the job-security side of the dispute. That closed one strand of the fight, but it didn’t close all of it.

A separate, more conventional pay offer – a 5.4% uplift under the Agenda for Change-style settlement, plus a one-off £750 cost-of-living payment – was rejected by the BMA’s Resident Doctors Committee at consultative ballot stage in July, with co-chairs calling it “pay restoration in name only” against the 28.9% they say is still needed to reverse the erosion since 2008. That rejection triggers a formal strike ballot and mid-September has been the point flagged by trusts and employment specialists as the earliest new industrial action could legally begin, once the mandatory notice period runs its course. Left Field hasn’t seen a confirmed ballot result or strike dates as we go to press. 

Ballots: the rules are about to change

The backdrop to all of this is the Employment Rights Act, which reshapes how disputes like these get fought from now on. Electronic and workplace balloting for statutory strike ballots became available from the end of August, replacing the postal-only system unions have worked under for years. On 30 October, a wider package comes into force with new workplace access rights for union officials, a duty on employers to tell workers they can join a union and a new right for workers taking part in industrial action not to be penalised for it.

None of that resolves Birmingham, or EMR, or the resident doctors’ dispute, or the next Arriva-style dispute. But it changes the machinery underneath them. Easier balloting means unions can move faster when a dispute escalates. Access rights mean organisers can get into workplaces that have kept them out for years. Both matter more in a year when councils and employers are already testing how far they can push pay and conditions before workers push back.

The pattern across these disputes is the same – management holds the line, the costs of holding it mount and the workers involved don’t budge. Birmingham is the sharpest version of that story so far and it won’t be the last.

What this all means for Labour

All of this sits awkwardly against the government’s own framing. Andy Burnham has spent his first weeks in Downing Street pitching himself as the friendlier face for workers and unions after the Starmer years and the Employment Rights Act is the flagship proof of that claim. But the disputes above haven’t gone away because the rhetoric changed and Birmingham is a messier story than a straightforward Labour failure.

The bins dispute started in March 2025 under a Labour-run council and it was that Labour administration which scrapped the WRCO (Waste Recycling and Collection Officer) role and imposed the pay cuts behind it. But Labour lost Birmingham entirely at May’s local elections, ending 14 years of control and the council is now run by a minority coalition of the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Better Birmingham Independent Group.

None of them created this dispute, but all of them have now had months in charge to settle it and haven’t. A coalition that likes to present itself as more sympathetic to organised labour than Labour has carried on spending public money resisting the same strike, with no visible change of approach. EMR and the resident doctors’ dispute are more straightforwardly a test of the national government’s own claims – a government that wants credit for a friendlier industrial-relations settlement doesn’t get to point at legislation still working its way through implementation while live disputes with its own agencies and contracted-out services run on regardless.

Warmer words and a genuinely different outcome for the workers involved are not the same thing and it’s likely that this autumn is where that gets tested.