NETHERLANDS -
Fighting experience functionaries continued to discuss it all night long.
After a sleepless night, even these two conservative unions proved unable to reach an agreement with the government. Lubbers' hard line had brought the four for public workers -Pyrrhic victory for hard-nosed government "There is very little either Christian or democratic about the Christian Democratic Party." (1) "One thing is clear, this government has to go."
When you hear talk like that at a Dutch union meeting, it means that something is going on. But when you hear these and many other such remarks at a meeting of the Christelijke Federatie van Overheidspersoneel (CFO - Christian Federation of Government Employees), you can talk about a new political situation in the country.
ing strikes.
The other public workers also staged a couple of actions.
unions together.
Finally, it was a combination of attrition and court injunctions that brought the actions to an end. In particular, when the postal workers and the Rotterdam city workers were ordered back to work, the public workers unions suffered a hard blow. The reiteration by the Liberal and Christian Democratic majority in parlia ment that they would continue to support the government also did not offer much hope. Between December 2 and December 9, most of the actions were The reasons for failure
How could a struggle with such mass
The change was brought about by a (Bus and rail workers belong to the transseven-week-long confrontation between port union, other public service workers the Christian Democratic-Liberal govern- to the big civil service union.) ment headed by Ruud Lubbers on one side and the public-workers union on the
September, grumbling among the public service workers. And this is a very important sector in the Netherlands. There are 700,000 public service workers, plus another 500,000 workers whose wages and working conditions are tied by law to those of the public workers. This is out of a total working population of about 4 million.
This 1.2-million-strong sector includes such important groups of workers as those at the power generators, on the railroad, all the mass-transport workers and those in the municipal services such as garbage collectors and street cleaners, as as the post, telecommunications, customs and harbor-service workers. also includes, of course, teachers, the police and those working in the offices of the various ministries and the provinces.
What prompted the confrontation was a 3.5% wage cut. Under the pressure of the public workers actions, this cut was reduced at an early stage by 0.5%. December 14, parliament passed a law to meet this agreement. But, although the direct result of the October, November and December actions thus seems small, it would be wrong to talk about a Transport workers take lead
The terms of the conflict were already showed in an initial round of negotiations on October 5 that it was not ready to make any concessions to the union representatives. by Rietkerk, the Liberal minister of the interior, provided the match that set the powder alight.
On October 17, the railroad workers in Amsterdam started it going with workto-rule actions this was three weeks ahead of the plans of the union leader-
The rest of the country followThe local bus services started rotatInternational Viewpoint 30 January 1984
The escalation of the actions can be dated from November 2. round of negotiations brought a limitation of the wage cut to 3%. But that was as far as the government was prepared to go. The negotiators for the state said that they were bound by the agreement on which the ruling coalition is based. that was that.
Within five days the most important actions were underway. The railway workers went from work-to-rule actions to region-by-region rotating strikes. post was paralyzed by strikes at the sorting centers and by the postal drivers.
The customs workers started work-towhich led in particular to major delays for truck traffic. In Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the sanitation work-
At the same time, other municipal services started rotating actions. In Amsterdam public transport stopped totally five times for a morning or a day. In Rotterdam after a week the transport workers started an unlimited
In a number of other places also, other public services conducted various forms of actions. In all, tens of thousands of people were directly involved in the ac-
To be sure, the numbers of actual strikers were kept down by the tactic of rotating strikes and strikes at key points, which made it possible for quite small groups of strikers to paralyze enterprises and services.
November 18 and 21, the strikes went into a third phase. ordered a third round of negotiations. In the first place, the Algemene Centrale van Overheids Personeel (ACOP), the civil service union belonging to the Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging (FNV -Dutch Federation of Trade Unions, the Social Democrat-dominated federation of unions), seemed to be becoming isolated.
A compromise proposal was rejected by the ACOP, but the Christian union and the two right-wing unions of higher support be ended in this way? And why was it practically only the public workers union that went into action?
the formation of the Lubbers' government in November 1982, the old days when this country was supposed to
"oasis of social harmony" have been fading fast. But, overall, the union movement remained very much oriented to negotiating in the framework of the tripartite bodies (labor, government and employers) that abound in this country. The various strike waves that hit the Netherlands in the early 1970s hardly affected this traditional attitude.
When the crisis set in in earnest in 1980, it led to a tougher austerity government here in the Netherlands as That is what the Lubbers' government
Because of an unfavorable relationship of forces in parliament and the reactions by the union movement to attacks on the workers' gains in 1977, 1980 and 1982, neither the Christian DemocraticLiberal coalitions that ruled the country in 1977-81 and 1982 nor the Christian Democratic-Social Democratic coalitions that governed in 1973-1977 and 19811982 were able to push the austerity drive very far.
Nonetheless, since 1979 real wages in the Netherlands have declined by 8% in industry and by between 16% and 20% in the public sector. But this did not solve the country's serious fiscal problems, for a number of reasons. First of all, up to 1982 the number of persons employed in the public services rose steadily. Secondly, through a complicated mechanism the evolution of wages in the public sector is linked to that in industry. Of course, this system has been breached from time to time, which explains how wages could fall faster in the public sector. tem as such remains in force. social-welfare expenditures have increased as a consequence of unemIn this respect, the Netherlands leads the Common Market, with a
In the Netherlands, the Christian DemoCatholic political organizations. - IV.
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17% unemployment rate.
It was impossible to austerity offensive and at the same time keep up the complex system of social partnership. But the previous ments proved unable to mount frontal attacks on it.
It is the Lubbers' government precisely that has taken on the goal of dismantling what is presented as a "no nonsense" cabinet, the leaders of the two big bourgeois parties have worked complete program for demolishing the system and social expenditures. In every test, the parliamentary majority seems to have given the government very nearly a blank
Politically the Lubbers' government has not had an easy time of it. Obviously, an austerity program of this sort also harms the interests of a lot of Christian Democratic supporters. ment's relations with the ber Christian union federation (Christelijke National Vakverbond, CNV) are al-
Moreover, a considerable number of those who vote for the Christian Democratic Party (the Christen Democratisch Appel - Christian Democratic Appeal, CDA) are pensioners, and so were hit as hard as the public service workers by the
The government's operation as a whole is supposed to produce savings of 10.5 billion guilders (roughly 3.5 to 4 billion US dollars) at the expense of the public
Three of these ten billion guilders are to come from a reduction in the number of jobs. The 3% wage cut is supposed to have another 2 billion. means that in the coming year still more stringent measures are going to be needthe remaining More wage cuts are, thus, inevitable.
Recently, the government has floated a draconian plan for social cutbacks. is supposed to go into effect on July 1, will probably be implemented in stages spread out over a year/
This plan is designed to cut back social spending by another 10%. It is, moreover, another step toward a total revision of the system of social spending, which in turn would result in new and
Lubbers is not altogether crazy. So, the government has drawn up an overall plan involving cuts in taxes and social insurance payments that will favor workers in industry in 1984. It needs to play the public and private sectors off against each other to get the political room to launch further attacks on the living standards of working people. In fact, about 180,000 minimum-wage workers in the private sector were also hit by the 3% wage cut.
The government has been able to create divisions. The tendency has always been to look on public workers as people who are paid too much for doing too little. Declining wages in industry have fostered envy against the supposed 18 advantages of public workers.
The fact that wages have been harder public sector is very little The wage differentials that existed before and the relatively small layoffs in the public services up till now have strengthened the impression among indusworkers that public workers
Of course, this is precisely where the unions had an important role to play in informing the workers of the real situa-
The next largest union, the Industriebond-FNV [which includes most industrial workers] deliberately neglected this task. It formally supported the public workers. But in its paper, ZIN, generous space was allotted to opponents of
Moreover, the union leadernot bother to correct any of these statements or reply to them.
The FNV (which has about a million members) as a whole supported these actions as a matter of course because they were against cutbacks. But no proposals for organizing concrete solidarity were forthcoming. In many cases, this kind of solidarity had to be organized against the opposition of the FNV. The isolation of the public sector, which naturally came under heavy fire from the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces and the media, did not make it any easier to carry out
There is a constant threat of division There are two big labor federations in the Netherlands, plus a number of smaller independent unions.
In the public workers actions, this meant that in addition to the FNV and CNV unions, two small right-wing unions were also involved, the CMHA (Centrale Middelbare en Hogere Ambtenaren -Federation of Middle and High Level Public Servants) and the AC (Ambtenaren Centra - Civil Servants Union).
Only the FNV unions went out on strike, although the CNV unions often participated in the actions. smaller groups were involved only in the negotiations. Time and time again they seemed ready to make a deal with the government ahead of the FNV unions, but finally the government's hard line did not permit this.
Thirdly, the forms of action adopted
The pinpoint strikes did make it possible to paralyze large sections of public services and enterprises at minimal expense to the unions' strike funds. But this method was an obstacle to extending the actions. It was precisely in the last phase of the strike that this problem became clear, when court orders were sufficient to stop the decisive actions.
Lastly, from the beginning the political stakes of the actions were not clearly understood. The union leaderships apparently thought that they could get some more concessions by a show of force. By November 2, it was clear that this was not so. But the union tactics remained tied to this orientation.
If the actions had won any real success, this would have led directly or indirectly to the fall of the government. Neither the Christian Democrats nor the Liberals wanted to run that risk, in particular since they faced the possibility of defeat in early elections. The polls indicate that the Social Democrats would make big gains and the government parties would lose their majority.
The most important development in this strike is that tens of thousands of people participated in actions for the first time. Before this there was scarcely any strike tradition among public workers, except in mass transport and certain municipal services. Now when the government makes the next round of cutbacks it will have to face a very widespread readiness for action on the part of the public workers.
The public workers unions have grown both in terms of members (the largest civil service union gained more than 10,000 members) and activists. Although a lot of the leaders are politically inexperienced, they continue to enjoy considerable confidence among the membership, especially in the case of the Abvakabo, the main FNV union for the public sector.
The actions were stopped by court orders that banned further strikes. There was a lot of grumbling among the ranks, but most of them did not feel that their leaders had let them down.
The defeat the public workers suffered in this round of cutbacks can, thus, be attributed to the political inexperience of most public workers. The courts have long been regarded as sacred. Now a whole series of decisions have made it crystal clear how judges act in big class conflicts. And the previous respect for the courts is fading. But this process of the court decisions were formal strike ban, everywhere that the actions had a real effect the judges banned further strikes. This is an ominous
The courts banned strikes at the same time that they recognized the formal right to strike of public employees (except for the police). This sort of reasoning, thus, could be applied to industrial as well as public workers.
It was against this open class justice that the strikes at key-points strategy proved particularly ineffective.
The Netherlands has seen other such
In the engineering industry on more than one occasion banned strikes have been continued by elected action committees.
Such action committees also played an important role in this strike. The central decisions were left to the union leadership. But the committees had a say in forms of action, about the most effective way of paralyzing the key point selected for a strike.
In view of this success, it can be expected that in subsequent actions such committees will again be called upon to play a role. Thus, the means is at hand for continuing strikes in the face of court
International Viewpoint 30 January 1984