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National strike day for regional transport and regional strikes from 6 September.

On Friday 16 September, regional transport will be discontinued throughout the country. According to the magazine Passenger Transport, regional buses and trains will be canceled that day. In addition, there are regional strikes in the run-up to the national strike day. The strikes in the region will start on Tuesday 6 September in Flevoland, South Holland and Zeeland. There will be a strike in North Holland and Utrecht on Wednesday 7 September and on Thursday 8 September in Gelderland, North Brabant and Limburg. The last regional strike is on Friday 9 September in Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel.

The strikes are a follow-up to the relay strikes that were held across the country before the summer. Employees of the regional transport companies want a better collective labor agreement, for which ultimatum the demands were laid down. Marijn van der Gaag, director of FNV Streekvervoer: “The sector must become more attractive so that new staff can be recruited. At the moment there is a lot of turnover, resulting in staff shortages. As a result, the workload increases and with it the absenteeism due to illness.”

The union and members understand that strikes in public transport can cause nuisance to the public. "The fact that the members are still on strike shows how great the need is," says Van Der Gaag. Moreover, according to the union, the strike is also in the interest of travelers. At the same time as the strikes, the employees sounded the alarm about the impoverishment of regional transport that has been going on for years.

In recent years, an estimated thirty percent of the journeys have disappeared due to corona, staff shortages and the annual, regular scaling down. Van der Gaag: “Everything shows that the managements of the transport companies only have one thing in mind: cut back, cut back and cut back some more. Staff suffers as a result of poor working conditions and the traveler suffers from increasingly poor regional transport due to the cancellation of lines.”

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The impoverishment of regional transport is a growing problem, especially in rural areas, according to the union. “Urban transport companies are letting go of loss-making lines in the outlying areas and exchanging them for increasingly busy lines in the Randstad conurbation. But public transport should not revolve around as much profit as possible, it is a basic need for many people. There has to be a change in the system we have now. Instead of being profit-driven, it should be service-driven again,” says Van Der Gaag.

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