Dutch transport strike signals broader European class confrontation over austerity and war

On the morning of June 24, the Netherlands went quiet. At four o'clock, the rail networks fell silent. Buses stopped running. Trams and metro cars sat empty in their depots. For four hours—until eight in the morning—public transport across the country simply ceased. Amsterdam Centraal, usually a river of commuters and travelers, stood nearly deserted. The departure boards announced the strike. The loudspeakers confirmed it. Only a handful of services kept moving: the ferries across the IJ, the train to Schiphol airport. Everything else had stopped.

This was not the kind of strike Dutch workers had staged in recent years. Those had been about wages, about working conditions, about the usual grievances that pit labor against management. This one was different. It was a strike aimed at the government itself—specifically at Prime Minister Rob Jetten's cabinet, which had taken office in February with the smallest parliamentary mandate in Dutch history: just 26 of 150 seats. The strike was directed at what the workers called a war cabinet, one that had decided to gut unemployment benefits, to slash disability payments, to dismantle the pension protections that Dutch workers had fought for and won in the decades after World War II. A survey of union members showed 98 percent opposed to the cuts. More than 85 percent said they were ready for a prolonged strike. The leadership of the FNV, the main trade union federation, had every mandate it could ask for. Instead, it called a four-hour "pinprick"—a symbolic gesture, a warning shot, nothing more.

The timing was not accidental. Exactly one year earlier, on June 24 and 25 of 2025, NATO powers had gathered in The Hague and pledged to raise military spending toward 5 percent of GDP. The cuts now being imposed on Dutch workers were the domestic bill for that pledge. Across Europe, the same pattern was repeating. In Belgium, workers had been striking for more than a year against pension reforms and wage cuts, with 100,000 marching in March carrying signs that read: "We will not pay the price of their wars." In France, four rail unions had struck together on June 10, declaring an emergency on a network being starved of investment while workers' wages fell behind rising prices. In Portugal, a general strike in early June had halted trains and grounded hundreds of flights. In Italy, a nine-month wave of strikes had culminated in a general stoppage on June 20 that brought dockers in Genoa, Livorno and Ancona into the streets, refusing to load weapons bound for Israel. The pattern was unmistakable: the European working class was being asked to sacrifice its living standards and social protections to finance its rulers' rearmament and their wars.

The Dutch government had made rearmament the organizing principle of the state. It was writing into law a military target of 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035, rising toward 5 percent once "security-related" spending was added. It had invented something called a "Freedom Contribution"—a war tax—to partially finance a nineteen-billion-euro expansion of the armed forces. The chief beneficiaries were the arms manufacturers: Thales, Rheinmetall, Lockheed Martin. Rheinmetall's stock had risen roughly 400 percent in three years. Its 2025 operating profit had climbed by a third. Its dividend had jumped 42 percent. Meanwhile, official poverty in the Netherlands had risen for the first time in five years, to 551,000 people. Nearly half of them were working poor—employed but unable to make ends meet. Schools were handing out free breakfasts to hungry children. The welfare cuts were not a matter of fiscal necessity. The unemployment and disability funds held a surplus of roughly ten billion euros, money accumulated from workers' own pay deductions. The money was not lacking. It was simply being moved from social welfare to the war chest.

The Jetten government presented itself as a moderate, centrist successor to the far-right government that had preceded it. In reality, it was carrying forward the entire right-wing agenda at lightning speed. The cabinet had even fought a court ruling that found Dutch arms exports to Israel carried a "clear risk" of facilitating serious violations of international law. When an appeals court ordered the exports stopped, the government took the case to the Supreme Court, which in October 2025 concluded that arming Israel was a matter for the government, not the judiciary. The Netherlands hosted one of Europe's three F-35 logistics hubs supplying the fighter jets deployed in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens had joined "Red Line" demonstrations against the war. A quarter of a million had marched in Amsterdam on October 5, 2025—the largest protest since 1981. Yet the government had found ways to keep the weapons flowing, reportedly routing components through the United States to circumvent the formal suspension.

What made the June 24 strike significant was not its duration but what it revealed about the forces at play. The union leadership had deliberately limited its scope. FNV board member Edwin Kuiper had promised in advance that "real" 24-hour strikes "might follow" but not until "after the summer." The rail union had cut the stoppage to four hours specifically to limit its reach, because a fuller strike threatened to galvanize broader support. Dock workers had been strike-ready since March. Some 160,000 public sector workers had walked out just weeks earlier. Rail workers had brought the network to a halt in 2025. The conditions for a unified movement of transport, dock, logistics and public sector workers were plainly present. The union bureaucracy's task was to prevent exactly that—to stage a brief, segmented protest that vented anger without disrupting economic life, then send everyone home until autumn. This was the essential function of the trade union apparatus: a safety valve, releasing pressure so that austerity and war spending could proceed without serious disruption.

The fear running through the union leadership was a fear of the working class's own history. Dutch transport workers had struck three times in a single decade and each time set the entire class in motion. In February 1941, when Nazi occupiers began rounding up Amsterdam's Jews, the city's tram drivers walked out. Dock workers followed. Within a day, 300,000 workers had joined them—the only mass strike against the persecution of Jews anywhere in occupied Europe. In September 1944, railway workers had struck to disrupt Nazi troop movements. And in September 1946, as the Dutch state prepared to drown the Indonesian Revolution in blood and reimpose colonial rule, transport workers had occupied the front rank of the struggle. After military police shot a worker at an anti-war demonstration in Amsterdam on September 21, a wildcat strike broke out three days later against troop transports bound for Indonesia. From Amsterdam to Groningen, workers moved into action. The strike revealed the immense social force concentrated in the transport sector—only to be contained and betrayed by the union apparatus.

Today, the successors of those courageous workers occupied positions no less strategic. Transport, dock, warehouse and industrial workers sat astride the choke points through which everything moved—food and energy, but also components, munitions and the machinery of war. As Europe's governments poured billions into rearmament, these were the workers on whom both commerce and militarization depended. An independently mobilized stoppage could halt not only production and trade but the material infrastructure of war itself at its most sensitive points. The mood among workers was outgrowing the union ritual of symbolic action. What held it back was not unwillingness to fight but a bureaucracy determined to keep the workers' struggles fragmented, controlled and safely within the national framework.