In the coalition agreement stands dryly that 28 percent (!) of all Dutch people are financially vulnerable, especially people with flexible work. A phenomenon that The Hague has been discussing with concern for years, but strangely enough never treats with priority. If Covid breaks out, billions are immediately available for income and business support. When the war starts in Ukraine, the same goes for the defense budget. Logical in both cases.
But you do wonder why it should take so much more time to address the vulnerability of nearly a third of the population.
The weekend illustrated what went wrong. On Sunday, connoisseurs of French politics outlined that Le Pen’s growing vote percentage underlines the potential of the nationalist right. In the Netherlands, since Fortuyn, this current has usually reached just under twenty percent.
But when 150 baggage workers shut down Schiphol with a wild strike on Saturday, you didn’t get the idea that the country was thinking: these are the people who have every reason to give up their faith in traditional politics.
Yet it is. Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Rutte called on companies higher wages to pay out. KLM did the opposite last week: although the rest of the sector pays ground staff 14 euros per hour, KLM refuses to reimburse people more than 11 euros for baggage handling and it barely employs people on a permanent basis. And when staff shortages threatened on Thursday, it quickly hired more flex workers externally. A well-known trick to keep wages low. Hence the strike.
You couldn’t really blame those people. They do dirty, unpleasant and very unhealthy work. Without them, the entire aviation industry will be in shambles. In the corona crisis, they saw that the policy of KLM, the company that squeezes them, costs 3.4 billion euros gave state aid. When the CEO of the loss-making Air France-KLM continued to receive generous annual bonuses, ministers said: do nothing about it† But when the cabinet promised the 3.4 billion government aid, one condition was that ordinary KLM staff yielded an average of 15 percent. This is the reason why the management now insists that the ground staff will not get anything extra.
The world is reversed: a welfare state for the company and the CEO, the greatest risks for flex workers at the bottom.
For example, it turned out on Saturday that striking flex workers demanded market forces – wages for work, extra wages in the event of scarcity — but that The Hague blocked this earlier. While the same The Hague could see for the umpteenth time that it is delaying the reduction of flexible work for far too long.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 26, 2022