Articles with the Tag Amsterdam

Fewer Brits in Amsterdam

Amsterdam, Dutch politics, economic crisis
Published on

With some two to three million unemployed already in the UK there were always going to be fewer people taking their stagnight to Amsterdam, but the ongoing war on fun cannot help. For years now the Amsterdam city council has tried to attract a higher class of tourists, wanting to present the city as one of culture and musea rather than of hookers and coffeeshops. So far this has met with little succes, but the city has managed to alienate many of the traditional visitors. What Amsterdam has been aiming at is the high value tourist, who wants to stay in a nice hotel and eat in expensive restaurants after a day of visiting the Rijksmuseum or van Gogh museum and browsing through quaint little antique or fashion shops. To make room for those tourists the city council has been on a crusade against the traditional attractions of Amsterdam: the Red Light district, the coffeeshops and the whole infrastructure of backpacker hotels and kebab shops.

To me this strategy never made sense other than as an expression of misplaced snobbery, as Amsterdam, nice town that is, really has little to offer this kind of tourist cannot find anywhere else and better. You want culture, high end shopping and fine dining? Why go to Amsterdam if you can go to Paris, or London, or Barcelona, or Vienna or Moscow even, or…

Sure, there are plenty of other party towns in Europe as well; Prague or Riga for example, which also attract a lot of British tourists out on a stag do or hen weekend. But Amsterdam is unique in that you could party safely here: do a bit of harmless experimenting with drugs or visit a live sexshow without fear of the police. Especially the coffeeshop gave Amsterdam its reputation as a city where everything goes. For all the foreign politicians who railed about it there were hundred of young people who wanted to come over. But no more. Tourism is flagging, the Brits are staying home or moving on to cities that do appreciate them. In hindsight, putting mayor Job Cohen on UK television warning boozing Brits to stay away might not have been the smartest idea…

Dutch smoking ban also hits coffeeshops

Amsterdam
Published on

They’re often the main reason y’all want to visit Amsterdam: to gawk at the hookers in the Red Light District and to light up a fat old blunt in one of the coffeeshops. Unfortunately your chances to do so are diminishing steadily, as the Amsterdam city council is busy “cleaning up” the Red Light district by buying up properties and chasing away the prostitutes, while from July 1st there will be a nation wide smoking ban for the catering industry. Including coffeeshops.

Which may sound odd, because if there’s one place you go to smoke something, it’s a coffeeshop, but than the law’s intention isn’t to harass smokers (smokers may disagree about this), but to protect workers in the catering industry, just like workers in other industries are protected from their smoking co-workers. Coffeeshop or not, standing in secondhand tobacco smoke for eight hours or longer doesn’t do much for your health. It seems absurd at first, but since we already acknowledge the dangers of secondhand smoke in other industries, why should coffeeshops be exempt? Saying that the employees had a choice not to work in a coffeeshop isn’t good enough; there’s a reason governments make worker protection mandatory. If they don’t, history shows that workers have no protection and no choice but to accept this.

So, smoke ’em if you got them, because tomorrow you will have to do so outside.

Victory to the firefighters?

Amsterdam, Unions
Published on

striking firefighters in Amsterdam

For the past two years the public service unions have been in negotiation with the council of Dutch municipalities for a new collective working agreement. The process has been acrimonious to say the least, with several high profile strike actions by public transport workers, harbour employees and even sanitation workers during Sail 2005. The negotiation point that caused the most difficulties, was the ending the right to retirement at age 55 for those workers in professions which are recognised as being risky and strenuous, workers like firefighters or ambulance crews. Back in the summer, the council of municipalities, which had been dragging its feet on the negotiations, made further negotiations conditional on the unions giving up this right. This was not appreciated, to say the least…

As a result the negotiations dragged out until last week –and the previous agreement terminates this month. The council of municipalities held firm to its desire to scrap the right to retire at 55, partially because it was pressured by the national government to do so, because according to the new age discrimination laws coming into action in January 2006, this sort of arraignment is illegal..

Last week a new agreement was finally reached by the union negotiators and the municipalities, in which those employees who would’ve been able to retire at 55 under the old rules and who had worked for more twenty years would still be able to do so, but everybody else would have to stay on after 55. Workers with less than twenty service years would be forced to trade their job for something less strenuous.

The unions might have agreed to this, but the workers, especially, the firefighters, were less than impressed and started a series of wildcat strikes. The good news is that the pressure of these forced the unions to renegotiate to reach a less onerous settlement. In the new agreement, those firefighters with less than twenty years of service now will be able to partially retire at 55 and fully retire at 59, rather than being forced to work fulltime until 59. A modest victory, as this is still worse than what the firefighters had, but a victory nonetheless.

There are two things that we can learn from this whole fiasco. The first is the dubious role the central
government played in the negotiation process. It is clear that a large reason why the unions failed to keep the right to retirement at 55 was the pressure of the new age discrimination laws, which allegedly would make this agreement illegal. The municipalities made grateful use of this to pressure the unions, but it seems to me this agreement could still be kept by making it voluntary rather than a mandatory retirement. I’m not a lawyer though. At the same time, the central government helped pressure the unions even more by making it financially less attractive for both employer and employees to keep these sort of arraignments in place. All this is not surprising, as the Balkenende government has made a fetish of keeping people working longer.

The second, more hopeful aspect iof this is that it is still possible for workers to put pressure to employers and unions, by not going meekly along with what the union bosses think is good for them, but striking for their rights. It does show the enormous gap there is between the union and the workers though, as you would expect it would not be necessary for the workers to have to do this.