🛑 r/Belgium is joining the strike on monday March 31ste ! 🛑

r/Belgium will be joining the national strike on monday March 31st, for this reason we will be closing the sub from sunday March 30th, 22u00 until Tuesday April 1st, 10u00.

As many already know, the strike is against the decisions of the new Arizona government and affects a lot of people. Unfortunately the mod team is not excluded from these effects. The unemployment benefits being reduced to a maximum of 2 years, means most of us will urgently need to go outside and get real jobs to get by. However if we all need to go work 38h hours a week, that leaves us little time to moderate the sub and maintain the top leaderboard positions with our COD clans.

On top of that, we also got a notification that our "Cultuursubsidies" are being reduced from €240k to a mere €165k for the next 4 years. That will barely cover our coffee and "worstenbroodjes" expenses.

For the record, we receive grants for the follow:

• Erkenning en subsidiëring van amateurkunsten (Meme's)
• Subsidies voor leesbevordering (Everything except meme's)
• Erkenning en subsidiëring van organisaties voor sociaal-cultureel volwassenenwerk (25% of "Ask Belgium" questions)
• Tussenkomst in de kosten voor een initiatief met buitenlandse actoren (55% of "Ask Belgium" questions)

To compensate for these losses, we have reached out to HLN to see if we could receive a percentage of the income that they generate from clicks generated from r/Belgium. In return we will start promoting HLN their paywall articles on the sub. We have also reached out to other big companies, such as the NMBS, De Lijn, Proximus, Telenet, Bpost, PostNL, DPD, and many other.. to negotiate about all the helpdesk service that r/Belgium has provided over the years for free. However, none of the companies seem receptive of our request for (what they call) "free money".

That is why we have chosen to also strike on monday, instead of tuesday April 1st. We want these big companies to feel how important r/Belgium really is for them, and how much work they will have to do themselves without all of us. They didn't even say "Thank You" once 😡.

We hope you all understand and support our decision to strike. The mod team works hard, almost every day, to keep this "beerput" clean. Many days there is only 1 droppel away from overflowing the bucket. You all may not see it, but we continue to work hard behind the scenes. From our basement and attics, to your phones and work laptops ❤

r/Belgium Mod Team

PS: If you would like to support our effort, you can make a voluntary, non binding, one time donation here. We are looking into the paperwork to have donations of +€40 being tax-deductible.