National education protest postponed due to train strike; Trains will run to Schiphol

The national education protest against budget cuts announced by the now-fallen Cabinet, scheduled for Tuesday, has been postponed. An NS strike on that day will halt almost all train traffic in the entire country, making a “central moment of action” impossible, a spokesperson for the General Education Union (AOb) reported. Trains will run between Schiphol and Amsterdam during the strike.

The action was previously moved from The Hague to Amsterdam because the former would be difficult to reach due to the announced regional train strike in the west. On Sunday, the trade union VVMC announced that the strike would be expanded to the northwest region. NS then canceled all train traffic on Tuesday because it could not offer “a reliable timetable” under the circumstances.

“Striking hurts, that’s part of it. This time it hurts us,” said the AOb spokesperson. “We naturally stand firmly for the right to strike and want to express our solidarity with the train strikers.” According to the organization, it will be holding a new action after the summer, “closer to the elections.”

According to the trade union FNV, “thousands of students and employees from all over the Netherlands planned to come to Amsterdam to protest against the dismantling of Dutch higher education.”

The railway unions said that they won’t revoke the strike, and “dissatisfied education employees” still have the right to strike on Tuesday, even now that the action in Amsterdam has been postponed.

An NS spokesperson confirmed that Schiphol will still be reachable by train during the strike. Sprinters will run between Amsterdam Central Station and Hoofddorp/Schiphol four times an hour in both directions.

On Friday, a strike in the Central region also brought NS train traffic to a standstill throughout the country. At the time, it was also decided in consultation with Schiphol and the unions to continue running Sprinters between the airport and the capital.

The strike is the result of a wage dispute between the unions and NS. The unions want a 4 percent pay rise, plus 120 euros. NS will offer no more than 2.55 percent. In 2022, NS employees received a 9 percent increase, and in the previous collective agreement, which expired on March 1, the unions and NS agreed on an average pay rise of 6.6 percent. But according to FNV, NS employees have been lagging behind inflation by over 5 percent since 2019.