{"id":26769,"date":"2026-06-27T02:50:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T02:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/26769\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T02:50:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T02:50:32","slug":"the-june-24-national-transport-strike-in-the-netherlands-the-political-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/26769\/","title":{"rendered":"The June 24 national transport strike in the Netherlands: the political questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, June 24, the rail, bus, tram and metro networks of the Netherlands fell silent. From 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., public transport workers called out by three branches of the trade union federation FNV halted the national rail operator NS and stopped almost all urban and regional transport across the country. By 6 a.m. Amsterdam Centraal stood all but deserted, platforms empty, the strike announced on the departure boards and over the station loudspeakers. Only a handful of services, the IJ ferries and the Schiphol airport train among them, kept running.<\/p>\n

Subway platform Lelylaan station Amsterdam. [Photo by Mark Ahsmann \/ CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Unlike the conventional strikes over better pay and working conditions of recent years, the Dutch transport workers\u2019 strike marked a new stage in its political character\u2014forced up from the rank and file and openly confronting the political direction of the state: it was a strike directed against the war cabinet of the minority government <\/a>of prime minister Rob Jetten (D66) and its drive to cut social security provisions won by the working class through the struggles of the post-war era.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At issue are the gutting of unemployment (WW) and disability (WIA) benefits and a broader assault on state pensions. A survey of FNV members found 98 percent opposed to the cuts and more than 85 percent ready for a protracted strike. Dock and port workers, strike-ready since March, are poised to follow.<\/p>\n

The stoppage was the Dutch expression of a class confrontation now opening across the continent and internationally. It erupted in the immediate shadow of the mid-June European Union summit <\/a>in Brussels, where the heads of government bound Europe to its largest rearmament since the Second World War: to make the bloc \u201cwar-ready\u201d for direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia by 2030, to pour fresh weaponry into the war in Ukraine and to build the \u201cdeep precision strike capabilities\u201d needed to strike deep inside Russia itself; a programme that directly extends to national austerity policies.<\/p>\n

The date of the Dutch strike was itself a marker. One year earlier, on June 24-25, 2025, the NATO powers had met in The Hague<\/a> and pledged to raise military spending toward 5 percent of GDP. The cuts now declared unavoidable are the domestic enforcement of that pledge. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who set the tone, had already named who must pay: working people in every country must \u201caccept restrictions\u201d to finance rearmament and war.<\/p>\n

The Netherlands is one front in a strike wave now sweeping the continent, everywhere driven by the same socio-economic and political conditions: austerity at home to finance war abroad.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Belgium<\/a>, workers have resisted the De Wever government\u2019s \u201cArizona\u201d coalition through more than a year of strikes against pension reforms and attacks on wage indexation. Inter-professional strikes in February were followed by a national mobilisation of 100,000 workers on March 12 and another nationwide strike in May, with demonstrators carrying banners reading, \u201cWe will not pay the price of their wars,\u201d as the government moves to increase military spending to \u20ac34 billion by 2034.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In France, the four rail unions struck together on June 10, declaring a \u201cstate of emergency\u201d on a rail network being broken up by successive reforms and run down through chronic underinvestment, while workers\u2019 wages continued to trail rising prices.<\/p>\n

In Portugal<\/a>, the CGTP\u2019s June 3 general strike\u2014the second in six months\u2014halted trains, grounded hundreds of flights and closed schools against a labour reform easing dismissals and curbing the right to strike.<\/p>\n

In Italy<\/a>, the June 20 general strike brought to a head a nine-month wave of industrial action against the Meloni government\u2019s austerity-and-war budget, uniting opposition to rearmament with protests against the Gaza genocide, as dockers in Genoa, Livorno and Ancona refused to load arms shipments bound for Israel.<\/p>\n

Across Spain, Greece and beyond, the same dynamic is at work: the European working class refusing to sacrifice its living standards and social gains to finance its ruling elite\u2019s rearmament ambitions and imperialist wars of subjugation and plunder.<\/p>\n

Within the Netherlands itself, June 24 was the third national strike since the Jetten war cabinet took office in February, following the two strikes of public sector workers in March and April against its 2026 pay freeze. What is emerging across the continent is not a series of disconnected national strikes, despite the unions\u2019 attempts in doing everything to keep it confined, but a single confrontation between the working class and a state machinery being reorganised for war.<\/p>\n

A government of austerity, war and repression<\/p>\n

The strike was directed at a government that presents itself as the moderate, centre-left successor to the far right and is, in reality, driving its predecessor\u2019s entire programme forward. Jetten, the media\u2019s \u201cyouthful centrist,\u201d won a narrow and unexpected victory over neo-fascist Geert Wilders\u2019 PVV last October<\/a> on just 26 of 150 seats, the smallest mandate ever held by a party of government, and was sworn in on 23 February 2026. Far from breaking with the PVV-dominated cabinet, as Jetten promised during the snap elections<\/a>, he has carried its right-wing agenda forward at lightning speed and with ruthless continuity.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

At the centre of the former colonial power\u2019s agenda is imperialist war. The cabinet\u2014D66 governing with the right-wing VVD and the Christian-democratic CDA on 66 of 150 seats\u2014has made rearmament the organising principle of the state. It is enshrining in law a military target of 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035, rising toward 5 percent once \u201csecurity-related\u201d outlays are added, and has invented a \u201cFreedom Contribution\u201d (Vrijheidsbijdrage), a war tax, to partially finance a \u20ac19 billion expansion of the armed forces. The chief beneficiaries are the arms consortiums\u2014Thales, Rheinmetall, Lockheed Martin\u2014whose share prices and profits have soared as social provision is stripped away. Rheinmetall stock alone has risen some 400 percent in three years; its 2025 operating profit climbed by a third and its dividend by 42 percent.<\/p>\n

It is in this light that the WW and WIA cuts must be understood. They are not mere Dutch budgetary housekeeping; every euro for wars abroad is wrung from the working class at home. There is no \u201cfiscal\u201d need for the cuts: by the unions\u2019 own figures the unemployment and disability funds hold a surplus of some \u20ac10 billion, coffers filled by worker\u2019s pay deductions. The money is not lacking; it is simply being moved from social welfare to the war chest.<\/p>\n

The war machine being financed at the expense of social need serves genocide. The Netherlands hosts one of Europe\u2019s three F-35 logistics hubs supplying the fighter jets deployed in the destruction of Gaza. In 2024 an appeals court found that continuing exports carried a \u201cclear risk\u201d of facilitating serious violations of international law and ordered them stopped. The government fought the ruling to the Supreme Court, which in October 2025 concluded that the arming of Israel was a matter for the government, not the judiciary.<\/p>\n

Against the war in Gaza and Dutch complicity, hundreds of thousands have joined the \u201cRed Line\u201d demonstrations<\/a>, including a quarter of a million in Amsterdam on October 5, 2025\u2014the largest protest since 1981\u2014alongside student occupations nationwide. Direct exports remain formally suspended, yet components reportedly still reach Israel via the United States, rendering the legal restriction largely symbolic in practice.<\/p>\n

The social fabric onto which these social cuts are being imposed is already at breaking point. In 2024 official poverty rose for the first time in five years, to 551,000, after the cabinet scrapped the energy allowance introduced to offset the Ukraine war\u2019s price shock; nearly half of the poor are working poor\u2014employed, yet unable to make ends meet. Schools increasingly hand out free breakfasts to children who arrive hungry, while poverty cuts average life expectancy by nine years for men and seven for women.<\/p>\n

All of this in one of the richest countries on earth, where more than fifty billionaires and over 450,000 millionaires live\u2014a concentration of wealth that stands in direct opposition to the rapid deterioration of living standards for the masses. With a shortfall of 400,000 homes there is a massive housing crisis, while more than 200,000 dwellings are held empty as speculative assets\u00a0<\/p>\n

Austerity is accompanied by escalating state repression. A \u201ctwo-status\u201d law, in force since 12 June, splits asylum seekers into recognised refugees and a lower \u201csubsidiary protection\u201d tier, stripping the latter\u2014most of them fleeing wars\u2014of family reunification and permanent residence. When the Senate threw out the Asylum Emergency Measures Act in April, a measure criminalising undocumented residence drafted by the former far-right PVV minister Marjolein Faber, the Jetten government moved within weeks to revive it through separate legislation.<\/p>\n

This scapegoating of refugees and immigrants is the indispensable complement to state austerity. Through May 2026, far-right mobs<\/a> blockaded motorways and set fire to asylum shelters. This is no spontaneous \u201cpopular anger\u201d but a campaign long cultivated by the entire political establishment and its media\u2014the targeting of 263,000 refugees, and 1,7 million immigrant workers, to divide the working class and habituate society to repression.<\/p>\n

The role of the FNV trade union bureaucracy<\/p>\n

The decisive question raised by the June 24 strike is not the militancy of the workers, which is beyond doubt, but the political role of the apparatus that claims to speak for them. With 98 percent of members rejecting the cuts and more than 85 percent ready to take up a protracted strike, the FNV leadership had every mandate for a serious fight. Instead, it issued an \u201cultimatum\u201d in late May, broke off official talks, and called a single \u201cfirst pinprick\u201d (eerste speldenprik): a few pre-dawn hours of disruption, ending before most of the country had begun its working day.<\/p>\n

FNV board member, Edwin Kuiper, described it in advance in exactly those terms, promising that \u201creal\u201d 24-hour strikes \u201cmight follow\u201d but not until \u201cafter the summer.\u201d Even the token symbolic strike was pared back, with FNV Spoor cutting the rail stoppage to four hours, from 4 to 8 a.m., to limit its reach, because a fuller strike threatened to galvanise broader support within the Netherlands and beyond.<\/p>\n

The aim of this deliberate calibration was to prevent the strike from developing into what it could readily have become: a unified movement of transport, dock, logistics and public sector workers against the government. Dock workers had already been strike-ready since March, around 160,000 public sector workers had walked out only weeks earlier and rail workers had brought the network to a halt in 2025. The objective conditions for a broader strike were present.<\/p>\n

The labour bureaucracy\u2019s task was to keep each sector apart to stage a brief, segmented, carefully bounded protest that vented mounting anger without disrupting economic life or drawing wider social layers in support, and then to send everyone home until autumn. This is the essential function of the trade-union apparatus: a safety valve, releasing pressure so that austerity, militarisation and war spending may proceed without serious disruption.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

That function flows from the bureaucracy\u2019s place within the state itself. The FNV\u2019s chairman, Hans Spekman, installed on May 1, 2026, was national chairman of the Labour Party (PvdA) from 2012 to 2017. His path retraces that of Wim Kok, the union federation chairman who negotiated the 1982 watershed Wassenaar Agreement and then, as PvdA premier, turned the dismantling of the Dutch welfare state into the celebrated \u201cDutch model.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ever since, the \u201cpolder model\u201d has meant not the advance of workers\u2019 conditions but cuts negotiated jointly by government, employers and unions in tripartite bodies such as the Social and Economic Council and the Labour Foundation, binding the apparatus ever more tightly to the state. Spekman\u2019s complaint that the cabinet\u2019s proposals are \u201cmeagre and extremely unclear\u201d is not the language of an opponent of austerity but of a co-manager irritated by the details of its execution.<\/p>\n

The pattern is identical across Europe. In Italy the CGIL has broken up rank-and-file efforts to join the fight against austerity to opposition to the Gaza genocide; in France the CGT and CFDT dispersed the mass movement against Macron\u2019s pension cuts<\/a> into isolated one-day outings; in Britain and Germany the rail and service unions rely on the same pre-scripted, token stoppages.<\/p>\n

The official opposition and the nominal left offer no alternative. GroenLinks and the PvdA, fused this month into a single \u201cprogressive\u201d party, Progressief Nederland (PRO), under Jesse Klaver, lament the cuts while accepting the EU deficit rules and the NATO targets that generate them; the ex-Maoist Socialist Party denounces the \u201cFreedom Contribution\u201d in words while backing the EU and NATO framework that drives it.<\/p>\n

The Dutch transport workers historic record<\/p>\n

The fear running through this apparatus is a fear of the working class\u2019s own courageous historic traditions. Three times in a single decade, strategically placed Dutch transport workers struck first and set the entire class in motion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In February 1941, when the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators<\/a> began rounding up and transporting Amsterdam\u2019s Jews to extermination, the city\u2019s tram drivers walked out followed by dock workers, and within a day some 300,000 workers had joined them. It was the only mass strike against the persecution of Jews anywhere in occupied Europe\u2014an act of internationalist class solidarity, that was brutally suppressed and later relabeled by the ruling establishment and its monarchy as \u201cnational resistance,\u201d stripping the February General Strike of its class content.<\/p>\n

The September 1944 Railway Strike, called to disrupt the movement of Wehrmacht troops and supplies through the occupied Netherlands, came not from below but from the government-in-exile, which had fled to London with the monarchy in May 1940, before the Dutch military had even surrendered. Subordinated to Allied military aims, it left the working class to bear the brutal consequences and pay a heavy price: 30,000 railway workers were forced into hiding from Nazi repression, while the retaliation blockade of food transports to the western provinces helped bring about the Hunger Winter, starving 20,000 to death.<\/p>\n

The lesson was driven home again after the war, in the form the bureaucracy fears most: workers turning their power against their own ruling class. In September 1946, as the Dutch state prepared to drown the Indonesian Revolution in blood and reimpose colonial rule, transport workers once again occupied the front rank of the struggle. After military police shot a worker at an anti-war demonstration in Amsterdam on September 21, a 24-hour wildcat strike broke out three days later against the troop transports bound for Indonesia. From Amsterdam to the Zaan region, Velsen, Delft, Enschede and Groningen, workers moved into action. The strike revealed the immense social force concentrated in the transport sector, only to be contained and betrayed by the Stalinist-led trade union apparatus.<\/p>\n

Today the successors of those courageous workers, who defied fascism and a brutal colonial regime occupy positions no less strategic. Transport, dock, warehouse and industrial workers sit astride the choke points through which everything moves\u2014food and energy, but also components, munitions and the machinery of war. As Europe\u2019s governments pour billions into rearmament, these are the workers on whom both commerce and militarisation depend. An independently mobilised stoppage could halt not only production and trade but the material infrastructure of war itself at its most sensitive points. The mood among workers is outgrowing the union ritual of symbolic action. What holds it back is not unwillingness to fight but a bureaucracy determined to keep the workers struggles fragmented, controlled and safely within the national framework.<\/p>\n

Build rank-and-file committees!<\/p>\n

The defence of pensions, of unemployment and disability benefits, and of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to an apparatus that is organising their orderly defeat. It requires rank-and-file committees\u2014in every depot, station and port\u2014democratically controlled and independent of the FNV bureaucracy. Such committees would reject the logic of the \u201cpinprick\u201d and fight for what the situation demands: not a token few hours but an all-out, open-ended general strike to defeat the cuts in their entirety; not a cent for war; the opening of the books and the expropriation of the arms manufacturers under workers\u2019 control.<\/p>\n

Dutch transport and dock workers hold a strategic position: through Rotterdam, Europe\u2019s largest port, pass the very arms shipments on which the ruling class depends. Linked with the rail, logistics and port workers of France, Italy and Belgium\u2014who since June 2025 have refused to load weapons bound for Israel, from the blockade at Marseille-Fos to Genoa and Zeebrugge\u2014this social force can bring the machinery of war itself to a halt. To unite workers across sector and border, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has initiated the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).<\/p>\n

In the Netherlands as everywhere, the fight against austerity is inseparable from the fight against war, and both pose the necessity of ending the capitalist system that produces them. The defence of every social gain of the past century now raises the conquest of power by the working class and the socialist reorganisation of economic life\u2014the United Socialist States of Europe. Dutch transport workers, and all those entering struggle, should draw the urgent conclusions: make contact with the IWA-RFC, read the World Socialist Web Site, and take up the building of a Dutch section of the ICFI\u2014the leadership the working class needs to link the coming strikes that the transport workers have set into motion to the question of political power.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to the IWA-RFC Newsletter<\/p>\n

Get email updates on workers\u2019 struggles and a global perspective from the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, June 24, the rail, bus, tram and metro networks of the Netherlands…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5865,6,3954,2878],"class_list":["post-26769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-netherlands","tag-jetten","tag-netherlands","tag-strike","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}