class war

A clean victory

class war, Unions
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we want bread but roses too
“We want bread but roses too.”

I see Jay Vos has already linked to the news about the cleaners strike, commenting on my previous post on the subject. The longest strike in Dutch history since 1933 ended in a well deserved victory for the cleaners yesterday. A binding agreement between the unions and employers has now been reached, which will see all cleaners recieve a 3,5 percent wage increase over two years, an added bonus for union members and strikers as well as free language lessons during working hours for those cleaners with limited knowledge of Dutch. It’s great news and proof that unions are still relevant and necessary, can do more than perfunctorily defend rights build up decades ago.

The cleaners strike then is an important watershed in union militancy, providing a direction for future struggles:

  • Cleaning has been outsourced by most companies and government organisations and hence competition is now completely price driven — despite talk from some customers about ethical handvest and sustainable contracts and all that at the end of the day bullshit talks and money walks.
  • Labour is responsible for at least eighty percent of the total costs of cleaning, hence there’s huge pressure to keep labour costs as low as possible, by keeping wages low and targets high.
  • And since cleaning is “unskilled” work, largely unattractive to anybody with better options (how many students clean office buildings as a summer job) it’s mainly people who can’t find other work, or don’t have the right education, or can’t work regular hours because of other responsibilities (children), including many (recent) immigrants. Union participation therefore is low as well.
  • Unlike the traditional union role therefore, the FNV had to be pro-active: actively recruiting new members while immediately campaigning with limited resources to improve working conditions. The unions had to prove themselves to the workforce.
  • They did this with targeted campaigns. Last year it was cleaning strikes at Schiphol airport; this year it was a general strike, but again set up to have a miximum impact with minimal resources. In total there were less than a 1,000 strikers or so (not all union members either) on a total of 50,000 or so cleaners nation wide.
  • So the strikers targeted highly visible customers like Schiphol and the railways, as well as semi-govermental organisations like the UWV (social security benefits). For example, they held a public sitdown strikes in Utrecht Centraal railway station, which is the busiest in the Netherlands. And it worked: public sympathy was high and remained high for the strikes, while the effects of the strike became increasingly noticable as it continued.
  • In a broader context the effect of the victory is benificial not just for the cleaners, but for the unions and workers as a whole. It showed the power of the unions without them coming across as bullies, which is often difficult to avoid in a hostile media environment. For once the unions were also on the offensive rather than the defensive and success here will make it easier to gain victories elsewhere.

An Undutch strike

Activism, class war, Unions
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Gansch het vuile werk ligt stil, als uw machtige arm het wel -- from http://twitter.com/SPUtrecht/status/10792473205

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 Happening World (11)

class war, Israel/Palestine, Your Happening World
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What’s new for Wednesday:

I knew there was a reason I liked them

class war, Football
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When I started following the Premier League seriously last year for no reason whatsoever I started cheering for Middlesbrough, who were promptly relegated to the Championship…. Turns out I was right to support them:

Middlesbrough footballers have given their backing to thousands of steelworkers whose jobs are under threat.

The players wore Save Our Steel T-shirts on Saturday as they warmed up before their home game against Ipswich Town in the Championship.

Workers were welcomed to the ground and invited to march round the pitch 15 minutes before kick-off at the Riverside ground and fellow fans clapped in support from the stands.

Up to 4,000 Teesside-based Corus employees and contractors face redundancy after a consortium pulled out of a 10-year deal to continue producing steel from its Redcar plant, effectively mothballing it.

Corus multiunion committee chairman Geoff Waterfield said how important the club’s support was to the workers.

“It is long recognised that the steel industry is the heart of our community. The foundations of Middlesbrough and Redcar are forged and built on the steel families of this region,” he said.

“Likewise, Middlesbrough Football Club is and has been part and parcel of our community for generations.

In this age of multi-billionaires buying up clubs like so many subuto sets, it’s good to see a club recognise its local roots.

The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein

books and books review, class war
Published on 1 Comment on The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein

Cover of the Shock Doctrine


The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
558 pages, including index
Published in 2007

Snow Crash was supposed to be a satire, but late in The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein describes what’s going on in the United States right now that sounds quite a lot like the future Neal Stephenson portrayed in his novel. There’s a hollowed out federal government with all its core functions, especially warfare outsourced, while rich suburbs are seceding from their own cities to become commercialised, privatised towns with security by Blackwater mercenaries to leave the rest of America to rot away as surplus to requirements. The most shocking example that of New Orleans after Katrina, Disneyfied for the rich white tourists, its original, Black population dispersed all over the US, their neighbourhoods bulldozed to make way for more tourist attractions. All this, according to Klein, the logical end result of thirty years of disaster capitalism, pionered in the Latin American dictatorships of the seventies, matured in Eastern Europe in the late eighties/early nineties and reaching its zenith in Iraq in 2003 and New Orleans in 2005.

The Shock Doctrine is Naomi Klein’s second big book about capitalism and globalisation, after No Logo. Both are critical exposes, but The Shock Doctrine is much angrier than No Logo ever was, more brutal, more pessimistic as well. Gone is the fascination and excitement that globalisation still had in the earlier book, when like a lot of anti-globalisation activists Naomi Klein could still admire the energy of it, even if fully aware of the horrendous costs its transformation of the world brought with it. It was the same kind of horrified fascination Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels showed for an earlier phase of globalisation, in the Communist Manifesto. In The Shock Doctrine this fascination has disappeared, replaced by disillusionment and anger.

Read more…