Yves here. Unrest, both organized and random, is set to explode as more and more suffer a sudden drop in their living standard and have to husband expenses carefully or even struggle to survive. This Belgian strike looks to be the fallout of the war in Ukraine, with higher energy costs producing lower growth and deindustrialization. That shrinks tax receipts as government expenses rise. And the easiest remedy is to push the costs on to citizens, who even in countries with unions, are less powerful than local and international businesses.
In other words, planned and time-limited protests, even if intended to impose real costs like a general strike, are likely to look tidy and orderly compared to what is in store.
By Stephen Prager, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
Much of Belgium ground to a halt on Tuesday as tens of thousands of workers flooded the streets of Brussels as part of a general strike against government austerity measures.
Schools closed, public transit operated with reduced service, and flights out of major airports were grounded as workers walked off the job. Instead, they marched through the capital clad in red and green, the colors of Belgium’s major labor unions, with some carrying signs that read, “Hands off our pensions” and “We will not pay the price of their wars.”
According to Morning Star, as many as 100,000 people took part in the strike, which was called by the nation’s three biggest trade unions in protest of measures by Prime Minister Bart De Wever’s government that the unions say slash pensions, reduce wages, and attack collective bargaining.
The marchers called on the government to roll back plans to raise Belgium’s retirement age to 67 and have called for an end to what the unions have dubbed a “pension penalty” that would cut benefits for those who retire early.
Amid rising costs caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran, the unions are also outraged by a proposed temporary capon wage indexation, which requires wages to rise in tandem with inflation.
It’s part of a broader trend of the government loosening labor rules for employers, which unions say has led to longer, more irregular hours and diminished employees’ work-life balance.
“People will have less money left over and will still have to work more flexibly and longer,” said Ann Vermorgen, the chair of the Confederation of Christian Trade Unions. “Even the Planning Bureau says that the reform will promote inequality and that poverty will emerge.”
Tuesday’s general strike was just the latest over the past year and a half, as the unions have refused to let up on their push to reverse De Wever’s agenda.
Gert Truyens, the chair of the General Confederation of Liberal Trade Unions of Belgium (ACLVB), said that with the pension penalty and the other labor proposals, the government was displaying “total disregard” for social dialogue by “unilaterally imposing things without discussing them with the trade unions and employers.”
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The welfare systems of EU were unsustainable from the beginning, cutting itself off from cheap Russian energy has only accelerated the process but it was always unsustainable.
Maybe they will rollout pandemic 2.0 and WW3 to “fix” this! 🙈
One fix is to debloat the inflated public and private bureaucracies, including security and spook machines, that have siphoned off enormous surplus value. However I predict that even as collapse accelerates and austerity is imposed by fiat and force, these will grow even larger and more inefficient. Indeed this already happened during the Great recession.
Ultimately the voters as a whole need to get serious about turfing out their Kept classes or else they are going to be strip-mined for every last night-clubbing session that can be squeezed out of them.
Or direct the ECB to drop the senseless inflation target policy and focus on full employment and pensions instead.
Then slowly move towards income and wealth equality, while introducing democracy to the system. Then, maybe, the voters can have a say.
Of course, the EU having been designed to prevent all this from happening, it is a tough task.
Polar Socialist: Indeed. The current push by the European Commission for 5 percent of gross domestic product to be wasted on the war budget is one example, which is then combined with the austerity pacts and the rules against running deficits above a certain percentage. The only way to achieve these is to impoverish the population and make work even more precarious. Glovo for everyone~!
Following Pedro Sanchez’s lead on war budgets won’t be allowed. Getting out from under all the problems caused by the euro won’t be allowed. And as the Romanians have learned, even winning elections, if you’re the wrong person, doesn’t seem to matter.
All of which goes back to what you say: “Of course, the EU having been designed to prevent all this from happening, it is a tough task.”
EU is going full oligarchic, trying to turn back the wheel of history to post 1848. And Russia is the biggest excuse in the cards.
Dingleberry: That’s a canard.
Public health-care systems are cheaper than the U.S. privatized system, as has been proven over and over.
Publicly funded pension systems are cheaper. DOGE went into the Social Security Administration and discovered, to its horror, that the fraud they believed in as an article of faith doesn’t exist and that SSA is leanly run. Here in Italy, pension payments are low, and I have discovered that my mid-range monthly Social Security payment puts me in the top Italian tax bracket. Hmmm.
What’s unsustainable is war. What’s unsustainable is endless speculation in the name of “free markets.” What’s unsustainable is allowing the rich to loot the public space with impunity.
And I won’t even mention why high-cost U.S. private schools may be unsustainable, too.
There is plenty of corruption in Belgium, but the welfare system isn’t the cause of it.
So: Nice try, but repeating the usual slogans of the Reagan years gets a tad tiresome, wouldn’t you say?
“The welfare systems of EU were unsustainable from the beginning”
Evidence?
Otherwise expect this ritual neoliberal shibboleth to be ignored.
What is really going to compound the resistance against this major attack on workers and their rights is the continued generosity with the Ukraine. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has urged NATO member states (i.e. EU states) to devote 0.25% of their GDP to aid for Ukraine which would effectively triple aid to Kiev to around $143 billion annually. So as workers see their living standards drop and they become impoverished, they will see their leaders still sending their money to the financial black hole of the Ukraine by the truck load. Sooner or later people will revolt over this.