Volkswagen is closing down the factories
- Dział: English news
The VW workers started a spontaneous strike in response. The Workers' Initiative organized the leaflets action in solidarity with the workers' struggle on December 6.
More than 2,000 leaflets about the situation in Brussels were distributed.
The strike began on November 17. On November 21 the workers started a sit-in in the factory in order to prevent the transport of products and machines. In the talks with the trade unions, VW refused to make any promises. The unions solicited good conditions for the early retirement of over-50-year-olds - unsuccessfully. On a meeting on November 23 VW workers in Brussels decided to continue the strike until the middle of December. On December 2, there was an international union demonstration in Brussels with between 15,000 (police numbers) and 30,000 (organizers' numbers) participants.
The employees interpreted the consortium's actions as an attack on their life conditions. However the media shows that struggle as a desperate act against fatality. The background to the conflict in Belgium is an agreement of the German trade unions to extend the official working week from 28,8 to 33 hours for the same wage.
Currently, the trade unions in the consortium do everything to make the radical fight impossible. Their chatter and twaddle from negotiating level shows they accepted cutting jobs in concern.
In the scale of whole VW, the rhetoric of trade unions expresses concern and worry only about national localizations, and not about all VW's employees. Certainly, such politics leads to nowhere and lets closing down factory after factory. In a longer time perspective the actions of company's authorities threaten all European jobs.
That's why the only way is the resistance against national trade unions boundaries and leading common fight on the basis of workers' self-organizing above national divisions.