Other government services may also fail here and there. It is even possible that town halls close. At the schools, teachers can go on strike, which can lead to the closure of classes, and the Belgian broadcasters can also be affected by actions for a few hours.
However, it is not yet certain who will strike and where, so Belgians are advised to keep the websites of transport companies and municipalities up to date for the latest messages, and to ensure that their children go to school normally.
National Day of Action
Tuesday 31 May has been declared a ‘national day of action’ by the Belgian trade unions. According to Jan Coolbrandt of the Christian ACV, this is a step lower than a national strike day, but as far as his union is concerned, Tuesday will be the splashing ‘peak point’ of a series of action days that started on May 19. Only the (Flemish) socialist ACOD has issued a ‘national strike notice’, which means that it really means business for this union.
Belgian public transport has been warning its customers for days about the failure of buses, metros and trains. The NMBS (the Belgian railways) expects that one in four trains will run. One in three of the IC trains runs, and only one in five of the local trains. There will be no trains at all in the provinces of Liège, Luxembourg and Namur because no traffic controllers are available there on Tuesday.
Tuesday’s Thalys Paris-Brussels-Dortmund has been cancelled, but what that means for the Thalys between Amsterdam and Paris is unknown. It can still be found in the NS travel planner on Monday.
General malaise
The Belgian government unions are campaigning against the ‘general malaise’ in which public services find themselves: wages are too low, pensions are under pressure and work is not valued. In education, there are also problems such as the ‘unsustainable workload’ and an incorrect distribution of staff: ‘an immense overhead versus too few people in the classroom’, according to Ghent professor Wouter Duyck.
The broadcasters are campaigning against ‘the largest round of layoffs in the history of VRT’. What that action, scheduled from 10:00 to 13:00, will consist of, is not yet certain. The Flemish broadcaster is protesting against a ‘transformation plan’ that provides for cost savings, more digitization, 116 ‘naked layoffs’ and the loss of fifty jobs due to natural attrition.
The biggest problems are expected on Tuesday in the cities of Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent. Flemish bus service De Lijn predicts that no more than 60 percent of its buses will run and advises people to look for alternatives, just to be sure, such as ‘teleworking, carpooling, cycling or walking’. The action day ends at 10 p.m. but it will also take some time after that before public transport works according to schedule again.