Never before has Piet Fortuin, chairman of the CNV trade union, experienced members applying for strike benefits from both his union and another union. Until now, with the continuous strikes in regional transport. “Our executives heard about this from fellow bus drivers while eating a sandwich,” he says of the discovery.
The same executives then saw it happen with their own eyes. “Anyone who stops working can report to a trade union garage at various places in the country. There they can then apply for a strike benefit. Our executives saw bus drivers first report to a CNV parking facility and then to FNV, or vice versa,” says the chairman of CNV. FNV agrees.
Fortuin cannot say exactly how many people are involved, but there are several dozen. Strikers receive 70 euros per day from the unions for the first five days that they stop working, after which that amount will increase to 95 euros per day. Those are net amounts.
Not the intention
From Monday, both FNV and CNV will explicitly appeal to their members not to apply for strike benefits from both. Fortuin: “A strike benefit is to cover your lost income, because employers do not pay wages for that day. It is not the intention that you will earn money from it, so to speak, by applying for that benefit from two unions,” he says. “That is not solidarity either, since your colleagues fill the strike fund. We will discuss this with our members”, says the chairman.
So it is not an official ban. “For this, the unions should include new rules in their articles of association,” says Pascal Besselink, employment law lawyer at Das. “And then the only question is how you find out that people are applying to two unions. Due to privacy legislation, unions are not allowed to exchange personal data,” he says.
“We don’t plan to do that at all. This is only a small group of people who may not even know that what they are doing is not desirable. We draw people’s attention to this and FNV does that too,” says Fortuin. According to him, that is enough for many people to do the right thing.
No chargebacks
The unions are not worried about the strike fund running out. It is well stocked, let them know. Moreover, they are happy with the influx of new members. “Of course, no one is against people joining two unions,” Fortuin emphasises. You take out a membership with CNV for one year.
There is also no plan to reclaim previously paid double strike benefits. You can’t. Besselink: “Trade unions have now only included in their rules that they can recover strike money if an employer retroactively pays wages for the days on which the work has been stopped.”
This week there will be another strike in regional transport. The strike is nationwide, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays only in Groningen and Friesland at the Arriva regional trains. The unions want to organize 15 strike days in six weeks. Employees want higher wages and lower workloads. The public transport employers’ association (VWOV) says it cannot meet these requirements.
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