AMSTERDAM-The struggle by Dutch workers against attempts to drive down their real wages has been growing over the last three years. It reached a high point on March 20 in the second national Day of Action called by the Dutch Trade Union Federation (FNV), the country's largest labor organization.
The FNV called on workers to take the day off and come to Amsterdam to join in mass protest. More than 100,000 marched through the city. It was the biggest demonstration in the history of the Netherlands.
Amsterdam was almost completely shut down. About 150,000 workers throughout the country took part in the one-day strike. (The Netherlands has a population of about 14 million.)
Because of the halfheartedness of the
March 20 demonstration of more than 100,000 in Amsterdam.
FNV leadership, however, March 20 was only a partial success.
In particular, the railroad strike, the first since 1903, which was called in the framework of these actions, was a failure. Only 3,000 of the roughly 26,000 personnel struck, and service was not affected.
The FNV failed to mobilize the workers in a sufficient show of strength and determination to force the government to back down from its wage freeze. In fact, the FNV had been obliged to call for a national mass demonstration when its previous attempt at a show of force, the first Day of Action on March 4, failed to persuade the bourgeois coalition government to back off from its attempt to push through a law imposing wage controls.
The March 4 protest had been called for the eve of the debate in parliament on the government's wage-control bill. This move, moreover, came on the heels of a wage freeze decreed at the beginning of the year. In some sectors, such as meatpacking, where workers had won increases through strikes, their raises were rescinded by the government's intervention.
The government claimed that the freeze was necessary to give it time to readjust its social and economic program in the light of the Central Planning Bureau's figures for 1980, which showed much higher prices for energy and a worsening of the situation in international trade.
About 400,000 working people took part in the March 4 action, striking or participating in work stoppages. In a number of areas, the strike amounted almost to a general walkout.