A crucial year for the Netherlands Robert WENT AMSTERDAM - For three months, the Netherlands has had a right-wing government. Presided over by the millionaire Ruud Lubbers, a coalition of right-wing liberals from the Partij voor Vrijheid en Demokratie (VVD - Party for Peace and Democracy) and Christian Democrats from the Christen Demokraties Appel (CDA) have launched an offensive against the working class on many fronts.
The government can rely on a clear majority in parliament. This is the result of the victory of the right-wing parties in the September 1982 special elections held after the fall of the coalition of the CDA, the PvdA (the Labor Party, led by Joop den Uyl), and D-66 (Democrats 1966, so-called left liberals). This government fell after the PvdA lost so many votes in the regional elections that it had to stop going along with the Christian Democrats' demands for more and more austerity measures. Otherwise it would have risked losing still larger sections of its base.
So, the PvdA took its distance from the CDA's calls for further austerity. The D-66 took the side of the CDA, and paid the price for that in the September elections. Of the 17 seats it had, it lost all but six.
In the short time the new government has been in office, it has become absolutely clear that the capitalist parties are mounting a big new escalation of social cutbacks and preparing an even more drastic one.
- The government is doing everything it can to get rid of automatic cost-of-living adjustments in wages.
- Youth aged 16 and 17 can no longer mass layoffs in principle get no support, unless they get rid of their unprofitable sections. But first, the workers in these plants have to agree to pay the costs, to give up their cost-of-living increases, vacation pay, and take wage cuts.
- The previous government had a Social Democratic "plan for jobs," which was supposed to provide work for 25,000 people. This was far too little, naturally. But this government has adopted a memorandum on employment that does not provide for creating a single job but grants the bosses 6 billion guilders and infringes on various legal rights of the workers.
- The government expects that in 1984, there will be one million unemployed in the Netherlands, and a million and a half in 1986.
- Reprivatization of various publicly owned corporations is under study.
- Fares on public transport are going to be raised by 10 percent this year.
- The government wants to install 48 new Cruise missiles in 1986, but in view of the strength of the peace movement it does not want to say that and so it is linking deployment of the missiles to the outcome of the so-called peace negotiations in Geneva.
It is clear from this list that the Lubbers government wants to make the Netherlands a paradise — for the bosses. The bosses are obviously quite pleased about this, and they are making sure to keep up the pressure on the government by raising new demands almost every apprenticeship in the factories without pay.
- More social cutbacks.
THE REACTION OF THE WORKING CLASS
If we look for the reaction to this stepped up attack in the working class, we have to make a distinction between the leaderships of the trade unions and the PvdA, on the one hand, and large sections of the workers, women, and youth, on the other. A few key struggles in the first months of the Lubbers govern-
- In the first couple of months of the right-wing government, there have been strikes in the railroads (for the first time since 1944), in education (a week of strikes for the first time in history), and by sections of the public workers against the incomes proposals of the cabinet.
These actions have all been quite militant, massive, and popular with the people. This was true in particular of the teachers week of action, which a study has shown was supported by 80 percent of the Dutch people. This, in fact, could be seen from the massive support by parents and pupils in the demonstrations and strikes.
But the PvdA worked out a compromise proposal in the lower house of parliament. And the leadership of the union deliberately kept the actions separated. It refused to build united actions, raised no unifiying demands, and organized no solidarity in the rest of the working class.
- A great many actions have been, and are being conducted against threats of mass layoffs, for example at Fokker (1,100 laid off), ADM (700 laid off), and the RSV shipyard (6,000 laid off), the Bijenkorf chain of department stores
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- Wages for youth have again been lowered. TEGEN KERNWAPENS
- After February 1, everyone will have to pay 2.50 guilders (about 1.25 US dollars) for every purchase of medicines, although up till now they could be gotten free by anyone earning up to a certain income.
- The cuts in the social budget this year will be 7 billion guilders if the working class sacrifices 2 percent in wages. If it does not, the cuts will be increased to ten billion guilders.
- Plants threatened with closing or
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which the magdui to they got 11 out or the 19 Coes, the nes anger, in
(thousands laid off). • The trade-union leadership is keeping these separated, even if they are in the same
And it is prepared to accept without a fight if the bosses will just reduce the numbers a bit.
At Fokker in Amsterdam, for example, more than 1,100 workers, prompted by the trade-union youth group, called for negotiating a reduction of the workweek with no cut in pay. But the union negotiator refused to go to discuss this and agreed to 1,100 layoffs in the Fokker company as a whole.
At the ADM ship-repair yard, agreement providing for hundreds of layoffs and a 10 percent wage cut was seems that there is almost nowhere it has cost-of-living increase on February 1(2.06%), seemed impossible to get them to agree going to happen in still more factories
On Saturday, January 22, a coordinaof trade-unionists (including the national chairman of the from various movements, and people from the left political parties undertook to organize a national demonstration under the slogan: "Stop the cuts policy, for a progressive alternative." For the first time, the PvdA and the FNV were officially represented in this activity.
In all sorts of preparatory activities and discussion, calls were raised for initia(which cannot be gone into here), little concrete came out of this. participation of the PvdA and the FNV in a committee dominated by parties and currents to the left of the PvdA