Nationalise the energy sector! Increase all wages by €2/hour. Action plan to mobilise for a general strike
Energy prices are breaking all records. On 17 August, the price stood at €541 per megawatt hour. Four days later, a new record followed at €562. That did not last long: on 24 August it was already 612 euros. The government’s response? To make us swallow the bitter pill. “The next five to ten winters will be difficult,” said Prime Minister Alexander De Croo (Open Vld). They will not be difficult for everyone. Profits and dividends to shareholders are also reaching record levels.
“ExxonMobil makes more money than god” — Biden
ExxonMobil paid out $7.6 billion to its shareholders in the second quarter. US President Joe Biden dismissed this with a joke, but it sums up the situation well. Fifteen of the largest oil multinationals made a combined profit of USD 77 billion in the second quarter of this year, three times as much as in the same period last year. The jackpot went to the Saudi company Aramco, which made a profit of USD 48 billion. Meanwhile, Arlanxeo, an Aramco subsidiary operating in Zwijndrecht in the Antwerp port area, announced in June that it was cutting 70 jobs because of… the sharp increase in energy prices. Those capitalists are ashamed of nothing!
Last year, energy company Engie-Electrabel made a profit of 1.9 billion euros, of which 1.244 billion was immediately transferred to the French parent company Engie. In the second quarter, Engie made a profit of 5.2 billion euros. Figures like this may seem abstract to many readers. However, know that 1 million seconds equals 11 days while 1 billion seconds equals 32 years.
The mega profits are not limited to the energy and fuel companies. In the first quarter of this year, non-financial corporations in Belgium accounted for a profit of 35 billion euros. Yet the bosses claim that our wages are a problem? The government has no money, so they say, for relieving our energy bill. Yet to subsidise big companies’ profits, it always finds the means. The FGTB notes: “Compared to the last quarter of 2021, companies received almost three billion euros more in subsidies than they had to pay in taxes. Compared to the first quarter of 2021, companies received 11.6 billion euros more in subsidies than they had to pay in taxes.”
Workers create the wealth with our labour. Despite the index mechanism that adapts wages to inflation, the share of wages in the country’s total annual created value (GDP) has been steadily declining over the past 30 years.
They organise our misery, we must organise our anger
The rally for trade union militants on 21 September kicks off the campaign that is building towards a general strike in November. For the time being, the initiative is coming from the FGTB/ABVV alone, but hopefully soon there will be a joint trade union front. The build-up to this general strike must be done seriously with an action and mobilisation plan for a platform of demands based on our needs.
In order to avoid collective impoverishment, the full index must be restored and the wage law must be removed to allow for real wage increases. All wages must be increased by at least EUR 2 per hour in response to the inflationary shock. To keep our bills under control, the profit motive in the energy sector must be eliminated. The sector must be placed in public hands to enable democratic planning and green transition.
Government under pressure. Intense Class Struggle Will Dominate Autumn’s Political Agenda
During a business visit, Prime Minister De Croo warned of the very long impact that energy prices will have on the economy. His message that we are facing 5 to 10 difficult winters was a reaction to a speech by a spokesperson of a bosses federation who spoke of “thunderclouds over the economy” and “black snow” for many companies.
It was just as much a warning to the trade unions and the labour movement as a whole. The coming years will be difficult, we have to assume, is the discourse. But we can do it ‘with the necessary efforts’. This is not just a Belgian story. Macron followed in the footsteps of De Croo in France. We see the same in the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Macron stated that we must be prepared to pay “the price of freedom”.
Politicians and business leaders are coming up with these types of warnings as the labour movement comes to the fore to demand drastic interventions to protect the purchasing power and social protection of the working class in a period of deepening capitalist crisis.
The war in Ukraine is being seized upon as if it were some natural phenomenon that is happening to us. War is never something that comes out of the blue, but the result of increasing tensions and competition between great powers and of capitalism in crisis. The economic struggle for more profit takes on a military dimension. War is never waged in the interests of the working class in the countries concerned, but always in the interests of the ruling classes, for economic and political influence.
The working class is in danger of paying the price worldwide in the form of declining purchasing power due to exploding prices, unless it is able to resist and stop this capitalist madness. This will require struggle and an emergency anti-capitalist programme.
The business leaders like to pretend that ‘only the companies are paying for the crisis’. That is a warning to the government before it starts work on the 2023–24 budget. The bosses’ plea is one for even more state aid than they have already received in recent decades. This transfer of resources to corporate profits is putting increasing pressure on state coffers. Besides more state aid, they also want to attack our wages.
Thinktank Minerva at least questions the narrative that, alongside energy prices, wages are part of the problem. In the first half of this year, when the war in Ukraine was already under way, inflation was a reality and energy prices exploded, record profits were posted. Belgian companies did better than those in neighbouring countries. Based on the figures of the last decades, the think tank stated that “the gross profit margin of Belgian companies has never been as high as in the first quarter of 2022. The structural trend points to a systematic strengthening of the gross profit margin: whereas at the turn of the century the gross profit margin of non-financial companies in Belgium was still hovering around 36%, today we are recording a global profit margin of more than 46%.”
An automatic consequence is that an ever smaller part of the wealth produced by the working class benefits the workers in the form of wages and social security contributions.
Today’s panic among employers is partly motivated by the fear that a determined struggle of the labour movement will put an end to these profits. The messages of blackmail will increase in the coming days, weeks and months. We should have no doubt about that. The bosses also hold the key: if the production prices become too high, they will stop production.
We wrote earlier that, after the pandemic, the class struggle would be explosive. How explosive it becomes, we will see in the coming months. The fact is that the labour movement has no choice. The working class must brace itself against the brutal attacks of the bosses. Workers learned during the pandemic that we create the wealth. This wealth belongs to us. That must be the starting point of all action and it must fuel the mobilisation towards the general strike.
The government will be caught between two fires. The workers’ movement has a potential power much stronger than that of the capitalist class. If it sets itself in motion and actually organises and deploys its force, the government will be powerless to carry out the programme of the bourgeoisie.
It is unlikely that the government will launch a large-scale additional attack on the working class before the 2024 elections. Taking no action, however, is not an option for the labour movement. With the current coalition agreement retaining the law that restricts the possibility of serious wage increases and without drastic action to curb the record-breaking energy companies (by nationalising them if necessary), in this period of rapidly developing recession and possible stagflation, doing nothing is tantamount to a large-scale operation to impoverish the majority of the working population, including the middle classes.
Index: essential for our purchasing power
If the effect of the cost-of-living crisis is less hard for Belgian workers compared to colleagues in neighbouring countries, it is because of the index. The ‘index’ is a system to adapt wages to the development of prices. It was won by the workers movement in the revolutionary upheavals after the first world war, in a period of war and inflation. The system means that wages and benefits are adjusted automatically if the price of a basket of products rises by more than 2%. There are limitations: the composition of the basket has been tampered with and the adjustment takes place a long time after the prices rise.
This year, the Planning Bureau expects a decrease in purchasing power of -0.8% in Brussels, -0.4% in Flanders and -0.2% in Wallonia. Certainly the families with the lowest incomes lose more purchasing power. Without the index, it would be even worse and more general. Figures on the expected decrease in purchasing power in neighbouring countries confirm this: Netherlands: -6.8%, Germany: -4.2%, Britain: -5% and France: -0.9%. The French figure is more limited due to the freezing of gas prices and the limitation of the increase in electricity prices.
These figures show why the index is so important. The index was not given to us for free, it took significant workers’ struggle to enforce it.
Proposals to Prepare for the General Strike. Organise a Hot Autumn to Prevent Freezing Winter
“The wage battle has only just begun,” declared journalist Bertrand Henne in July during a La Première news broadcast. A few weeks earlier, 80,000 people marched through Brussels in a united trade union front, as the preliminary conclusion to a series of actions taken since February for purchasing power, more staff and also more resources for the public services with the strike of 31 May.
“If the employers and the government remain deaf, there will be a general strike in November,” said FGTB/ABVV president Thierry Bodson. In order to ensure that this does not remain an announcement, we must start mobilising from below towards a general strike. A symbolic one-off strike will not be enough to enforce our demands.
After all, this winter, the energy bill for an average family could rise to between 7,000 and 10,000 euros a year. Who can still pay that! Behind these hallucinatory figures lie countless human dramas.
The 1996 wage law is a straitjacket for our wages. What’s the point negotiating a new national wage agreement for the next two years if there is nothing in it? That is what they want to make us swallow ‘in exchange’ for keeping the index. Ideally, they would also abolish this protection of our standard of living, but today even the liberals are silent about a new index jump (in which one adaptation of 2% is ‘skipped’). They know that it is better not to pour more fuel on the flames
Without action, we are going downhill. The stakes are too high to wait. We must prepare the general strike now. Here are some proposals to make it a success.
An “operation truth” to answer the bosses propaganda
The great strike of the winter of 1960–61, the “strike of the century”, was preceded by a propaganda campaign called “operation truth”. This was a response to the government’s austerity plans. Today, employers, traditional politicians and the established media are telling a lot of lies. They pretend for example that our wages — which at this moment have a negative effect on inflation — and not their profits make prices rise. A campaign with public meetings, staff meetings in the workplaces and in our neighbourhoods can take up and answer these questions.
This could be supplemented by a ‘cost of living newspaper‘, on the model of the ’pensions newspaper’ of the joint trade union front in the protest movement with which we stopped the attacks on the pension in 2018. This should of course be accompanied by the usual mobilisation tools such as leaflets, hanging up posters at work, specific appeals from the trade union delegation itself (e.g. with the profit figures of their own company or sector) or distributing interesting articles from the media to keep the attention of co-workers..
Did you know, for example, that since 1996 the increase in Belgian wages has been 12% lower than the growth in productivity? Or that wage subsidies in Belgium are proportionally twice as high as in France, six times as high as in the Netherlands and even 44 times as high as in Germany?
That kind of data should not be limited to press releases. It has to be part of a broad campaign so that it can be used as ideological arguments to immediately check the bosses’ lies. . Does that mean that there are no bosses who get into difficulties because of the increase in raw material and energy prices? Of course not. The big ones gobble up the small ones, and this will not improve with a looming economic crisis. However, the solution is not in the pockets of the small ones, but in the coffers of the big ones.
Build momentum in every workplace
The best response to such a campaign will obviously not come from the traditional media owned by the major shareholders. We must aim at our colleagues. Through the trade union delegations and activists, we can reach a maximum number of co-workers . The best way to do that is with a joint trade union front from below.
The actions of recent years have shown that we can achieve stronger mobilisation after information meetings and staff meetings, especially if all those present can have their say. Such meetings also make it possible to talk to colleagues you don’t normally see very often, to discuss the situation at the company, to formulate demands, to decide on the next steps in the action plan or to prepare concrete material (banners, protest signs, specific slogans).
Rally society behind the protest
In Britain, militant trade union leaders and other activists launched the “Enough is Enough” campaign to coordinate resistance to rising prices. More than 450,000 people have pledged their support to the initiative. During the 2014 action plan, we also succeeded in getting young people, pensioners, the unemployed, the cultural sector and other layers involved in our actions. Together we are stronger!
The high prices are felt by everyone, the shortages are piling up everywhere. In recent years, young people have gained experience of action through, for example, the climate strikes. Today, those same young people are burdened with enormous costs for studying. By joining forces, young people can strengthen trade union protests and trade unionists can give substance to the just green transition that is necessary for our climate.
Develop and popularize a clear programme
The situation is serious and so must be our response. We need demands that start from the needs of the working class. In its appeal for 21 September, the FGTB states: “We demand once again: an indicative wage margin and freedom to negotiate; the maintenance of the automatic indexation of wages and benefits.”
Indeed, the abolition of the indicative character of the wage standard in 2017 contributed to a further increase in company profits at the expense of our wages. Returning from a legal maximum to an indicative wage agreement would be a step forward. Yet it is clear that the whole law of 1996 keeps our wages in a straitjacket. To break the wage norm, the wage law must go.
Keeping the index is absolutely necessary. Thanks to the index, our purchasing power is not declining as fast as in neighbouring countries. However, the basket of products that the index determines does not correspond to the real expenditure of an average family. For example, it does not include motor fuel and underestimates the share of income that goes to housing. Moreover, the indexation lags behind price increases. In some sectors, there is only one index adjustment per year. It would be better to demand a full restoration of the index with working class control over its calculation and composition. Whenever the index is exceeded, all wages and benefits should be increased immediately.
The cost of living crisis is particularly urgent, especially for low wages. In addition to the index and free wage negotiations, a demand for a general wage increase of 2 euros per hour can meet this urgent need. In 2008, there was a cost of living movement that called for a general wage increase of 1 euro per hour. We can repeat this demand: a general wage increase of €2 per hour on top of the index and sectoral and company increases. An increase of €2 per hour is equivalent to €330 per month. This demand can have a unifying effect and can draw often non-unionised staff from the low-wage sectors into our movement.
Wages of less than 15 euros an hour are no longer enough to live on. It is high time to also focus on the demand for a higher minimum wage.
Is there no money for this? Between 1996 and 2017, wages and social benefits in our country rose by 98%, but the gross operating surplus rose by 151%. That is the added value minus wages and taxes and plus subsidies. The dividends even increased by 216%. So there is clearly enough money.
In its campaign ‘up the wages’ the FGTB is demanding a permanent reduction in VAT on electricity and natural gas to 6% and other measures such as skimming off the surplus profits of the energy companies. With the current prices, that is not enough. The recent FGTB congress was more ambitious with a plea to take the energy sector into public hands. This demand must not be limited to a congress resolution, but must become a real point of struggle.
We must start from our needs and prepare the fight needed to enforce our demands. If capitalism cannot offer us even that, then we cannot afford capitalism.
An action plan to build up the fight
We must show that we are serious. This can be done with an escalation action plan with dates known well in advance and actively built up to. It is not enough to announce dates and then not do much with them. We saw the power of an escalating action plan in the autumn of 2014 when our protests rocked the Michel government. That right-wing government only remained in place because there was no second, stronger, action plan with, for example, a series of general strikes lasting 24, 48 or 72 hours.
The rally of trade union militants on 21 September is an ideal moment to launch the mobilisation towards the general strike in November. This mobilisation would be reinforced by actions in the run-up to it and by a plan after the November strike.
