The cleaners strike, the longest continuing strike held in the Netherlands since 1933 is still going strong, judging from the demonstration held in front of my office this afternoon. The sounds of drums was doing my head in, but it’s all for a good cause.
The Dutch are not a very militant people, more given to trashing out labour relations through negotian than through strike action, especially since the agreement the unions reached back in ’82 with the government and employers’ organisations to trade wage rises for employment. Ever since union militancy has been on a low level, with occasional flareups, but mostly existing in a cozy symbiosis with the employers and the government. Not anymore though. The last few years, even before the economic crisis hit, have seen a growing number of disputes and the crisis has given them a new urgency. At the forefront of this new militancy are the cleaners.
The cleaning industry is one of the least organised branches of industry, employing people who have little or no other options for employment, often migrants, legal or otherwise. It’s badly paid and little respected, with the workers only judged on how fast they work. Most if not all cleaning these days is outsourced, which means that any and all cleaning contracts are soley judged on how little they cost, which in turn means a race to the bottom: not gpood for the workers themselves, but little better for their customers.
In the last few years Holland’s biggest union, FNV Bondgenoten (full disclosure: also my union) has been busy organising the cleaners, last year resulting in succesful strike action at Schiphol airport. With the confidence this gave the union went into negations with the cleaning companies for a sector wide binding agreement on cleaners’ wages and benefits. These negotiations failed, with the employers refusing to negotiate seriously about the union’s demands. In response, the union went on strike — which was six weeks ago.
Which makes this strike the longest since 1933! In my own office, at a semi-governmental agency which shall remain nameless, our desks haven’t been cleaned since, while the most public face of the strike are the railway stations, as the Dutch railways is one of the companies suffering from the strike. For those of y’all visiting the Netherlands in the past few weeks; our stations are not normally this filthy. Such a long strike is very undutch as one of the organisers put it (in Dutch).
But what are the cleaners striking for? Not just for better wages, abysmally low as they are now, the cleaners are only asking for two dimes extra per hour for this year and the next. What’s just as important or perhaps even more so is to get respect, the sort of basic amenities white collar workers (like, erm, me) take for granted. Things like training, travel benefits, even being able to use the company canteens where you work. Which is why the cleaners are not just targeting their own companies, but their customers. Customers like the railways, Schiphol Airport, the Free University and the Dutch unemployments benefits agency are role models for how less visible companies treat the cleaners. If they treat them right, others will be less likely to mistreat them and only these sort of big, powerful companies are able to force the cleaning companies to seriously negotiate.
The cleaners’ struggle is an important one not just for the cleaners themselves, but for all workers in the Netherlands. This is not a defensive strike, a defence of existing rights, but an offensive strike, to build up new rights, part of the union’s broader strategy to mobilise and improve the rights of workers in the weakest, least organised parts of the “labour market”. If it succeeds, it will be a powerful step forward for FNV Bondgenoten; if it fails…
Your monday slice of linky goodness:
From Socialist Worker’s rolling update on the anti-EDL protests:
1.10pm: From Bolton, Victoria Square
Police have broken up an entirely peaceful UAF rally in the square and seized organiser Weyman Bennett. Trade unionists are trying to speak but have been stopped.
12.55pm: From Bolton, Victoria Square
Police are preventing hundreds of anti-fascist protesters from entering Victoria Square. Those inside are chanting “Let them in”. They have had to link arms to block the police and defend the UAF speakers. Riot police have repeatedly pushed into the crowd.
Weyman Bennett of Unite Against Fascism address the crowd, saying, “Police are rioting and are out of control.
“Anti-racism is not a crime, and it’s about time the police stopped treating it as such.
“I say to the police, if you can turn this number of officers out here today, why could you not stop the EDL running riot through Stoke last month?”
The EDL, the socalled English Defence League is the sort of acceptable side of the BNP, supposedly non-racist but just concerned about the “loss” of Englishness. In practice of course they are a bunch of white racist thugs just using the fact that mainstream politics has made islamophobia largely acceptable. The constant stream of scaremongering news items and editorials about the danger of “Muslim terrorism”, combined with the lack of the same sort of attention for “white terrorism”, has lead to a climate where Paki-bashing has become acceptable again. Everytime the EDL gets to march through a city unopposed helps strenghtened this climate, especially when it’s the police who make it possible by attacking the antifascist, antiracist counterdemonstrations.
The police of course always present that as a neutral problem of keeping public order, with the argument that allowing counterdemonstrations would lead to violence, yet as Weyman Bennett points out, where were the police when the EDL rioted in Stoke, unopposed?
With local elections to be held early next month, the AIVD, the Dutch security and intelligence service warns about an insidious new threat in the runup to these elections: the threat of antifascist demonstrations (Dutch). In a letter sent to all mayors in the Netherlands, the AIVD describes the sinister group responsible for this threat: AFA, Anti Fascistisch Actie and its methods. It makes for chilling reason the way this group is in the habit of contacting local governments to advice them on racism, organises counterdemonstrations against nazi intimidation and even organises within local communities to defend against racist aggression! Worse, they even deliberately cause the racists and fascists they organise against to attack them and beat them up.
Ironically, the AIVD even accuses AFA from infiltrating rightwing groups in order to gather intelligence on them — something the intelligence services have never done themselves, at least succesfully.
This piece of fearmongering, silly at it is, does show the mindset of those supposedly guarding us. Rightwing, racist and even fascist intimidation is not a problem, but attempts to defend against it are beyond the pale. This is of course neither new nor surprising, considering the rightwing sympathies of most intelligence services. As long as rightwing violence doesn’t threaten the state directly it’s tolerated, even encouraged, while leftwing activism is always a threat, no matter how legitimite or innocent, even in supposedly democratic states. What is new is how blatant this warning was, something we have not seen in a while. A more paranoid person might wonder about possible connections between this, the economic situation and the way this is used as an excuse for the drastic budget cuts the government wants to force through parliament…
