The trade unions FNV Bondgenoten and CNV Vakmensen reached an agreement with the employers’ organisation OSB (Ondernemerorganisatie Schoonmaak en Bedrijfsdiensten - Employers organisation for Cleaning and Office services) for a new collective agreement in the cleaning sector after a long period of negotiations and strike actions. The strikes had a serious impact on the public as for instance trains and railways stations were no longer cleaned. Representatives of the national railways and the airline KLM acted as intermediates to find a way-out for the stranded negotiations. The agreement, signed for 3 years instead of 3, is a new step towards the improvement of working conditions, a process that started in 2010 when the sector’s workers took the hardest social dispute the Netherlands had ever seen.
The previous agreements were signed in 2010 and 2012, both after nine weeks of strike, and belonged to the hardest social disputes in the Netherlands in the after WWII period (see articles No. 120004 and 100338). The negotiations for the renewal of the agreement started with talks in late November 2013. Soon it became clear that the positions of the collective bargaining partners fell quite far apart. The trade unions called collective action ‘inevitable’ after a manifestation in January 2014.
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