Regional public transport workers to strike nationwide on Thursday and Friday

Thousands of bus drivers, train drivers, and conductors in regional public transport will stop working on Thursday and Friday. The trade union FNV announced the nationwide strike after the unions and employers could not reach an agreement in collective bargaining talks.

The strike means that there will be virtually no buses or regional trains from companies other than NS on Thursday and Friday. Only employees of NS and city transporters in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague will not strike because they have their own collective labor agreements. The collective labor agreement for regional transport covers 13,000 employees, and thousands of them belong to FNV.

Strikes also shut down regional public transport across the country in September and October last year. The unions planned another four-day strike series in the autumn but called it off when collective bargaining resumed with the Association of Public Transport Employers (VWOV). The parties talked late into the night from Tuesday to Wednesday but were unable to reach an agreement.

VWOV stated after the negotiations that the unions broke off the talks despite an “above-average wage offer” of 8 percent. FNV director Marijn van der Gaag disputed that, saying that the parties simply ended up in an impasse about, among other things, the wage increase, the duration of the new collective labor agreement, and measures to reduce the workload.