The fall of the Dutch cabinet will not yet change the cuts in education and research, warn the trade unions. On Tuesday 10 June, they will hold a large demonstration at Dam Square in Amsterdam.
Next Tuesday between 12 PM and 2:30 PM, students, teachers, researchers, support staff and sympathisers will protest against the cuts of more than a billion euros to education and research. In recent months, they held a relay of strikes at universities and universities of applied sciences across the country. Those protests culminated in the announced nationwide demonstration.
‘We must make it clear that these unholy plans must be taken off the table as soon as possible’
Demolished
‘This cabinet was often accused of nothing coming out of their hands and that the Netherlands was at a standstill,’ says interim president Dick Koerselman of the FNV trade union. ‘That certainly does not apply to our education system. They have actively demolished that.’ He hopes people will come to Amsterdam en masse on Tuesday ‘to make it clear that these unholy plans must be off the table as soon as possible’.
D66 leader Rob Jetten is one of the speakers on Tuesday. Luc Stultiens (GroenLinks-PvdA) and Sandra Beckerman (SP) will also take the stage, as will Abdelkader Karbache (‘National Student Union’), Remco Breuker (WOinAction) and several others.
Work pressure
In the run-up to the protest, trade union FNV distributed a survey, which was completed by 1,400 university employees. The vast majority of them expect the workload to increase as a result of the cuts, and in 59 per cent of them it has already happened.
HOP, Bas Belleman
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