The two lead banners say: Who came up with this crazy idea to rob the schools? and: The government is running the show. Students are paying dearly for it.
There have been strikes against cuts in schools in Liège and other areas of French-speaking Belgium since 10 May, and they're due to restart on 24 August, when schools end their summer holidays (which started 4 July).
The background to these latest strikes was strikes in late 2024 against a new law threatening education. The vocational schools came out, and there was some solidarity action from other schools. It spread to most of the city schools, which means schools that are, not financed, but administered and organised by the city government, and it lasted a week.
Recent action has built on and gone beyond this.
The current movement began principally with some vocational schools, serving more working-class students, coming out initially. Other schools quickly followed them.
Belgium has a variety of publicly-funded secondary schools: Catholic schools, schools run by the language "Communities" (with funding from the regional governments), federal schools, city-run schools, etc.
At that stage, none of the Catholic schools or the federal state schools came out.
Over the following two years, there was considerable animosity towards the organisers of the strike from the local union (which in Liège means mainly the FGTB, historically linked to the Socialist Party, as against the CSC, the Catholic union confederation). The national union strategy was essentially to call regular one-day strikes to let off steam, meaningless in terms of an industrial strategy. This was true of all industries, not just schools.
Great dissatisfaction developed amongst the rank and file, and a considerable number of people started not bothering to heed the call every time the union called a strike.
After a while, the activists won grudging acceptance from the local union, with minimal support - legal cover, a press statement and the helpful prediction "You will get nowhere". "You", not "we".
So there was a union strike authorisation in April. Some schools then voted to go out on 13 May, two days into the final (exam) term and following the last aimless one-day national strike, and more from 18 May. And so by the end of that week, virtually every secondary school in Liège was out.
Since the end of 2024 activists in the schools which took the initiative had been making contact and talking with union representatives, and essentially building a rank and file organisation. We just went and spoke to people in the Catholic schools and the Community schools, whereas in usual official union procedure they are firmly siloed.
This meant a great deal because the culture of many of the Catholic schools is far more bourgeois, with more "aspirational" parents sending their kids there in the expectation of something better, while city schools have become more and more underfunded. Ring any bells, England?
Now we had flying pickets going to schools where there were not enough active people to make an effective picket on their own. We overcame the local bureaucracy of both unions.
These have been what in Belgium are called "blocking" pickets, as distinct from "filter" pickets. No-one crosses the picket lines. This has meant that we could continue the strike far longer, by a few teachers striking in each school and "blocking" out the other teachers by pickets. Those blocked would then in effect form a picket, or go and picket out other schools. Myself, I have lost on average maybe one day's pay a week since the strikes started. Importantly, low minimum numbers of official pickets means the strike can last longer. Where schools negotiated naively higher numbers - ten or twenty - they found it harder to maintain the strike.
From the second week, schools outside the city in the province of Liège started to come out, in places like Verviers and Vise. The national unions covered strikes until the end of the year in Wallonia and Brussels.
Although the cuts, broadly speaking, apply across Belgium, with differences between the two big "Communities" which run schools, French-speaking and Flemish-speaking, there was nothing like this action and organisation in other cities.
Despite the natural tendency of bureaucracies to be bureaucracies, and despite shenanigans, we get to vote in the general assemblies in Liège, and when we get massive majorities, they can't really argue.
The first general assembly was about 200, and 80 to 90 has been the lowest. Usually 150 is a reasonable estimate.
By contrast, in the capital city, Brussels, the teachers haven't had a general assembly in two years. The union is weaker in its organisation and weaker in its democracy. When we started to come out, they were not ready to join us.
Most of what they were doing there was performative, demonstrative. You do rah-rah-rah for an hour, and then you go and work. Without denigrating their enthusiasm, they had no experience of organising strikes without the bureaucracy.
A melodrama unfolded in parliament around the next, rushed, laws passing cuts, and a national demonstration - illegal within the "neutral" zone around the BrusselsWalloon parliament - was organised for 4 June.
The students got impatient, and went into the city centre in their thousands. A few burned things, mainly bins and rental bikes. I didn't know they were so flammable, but they're really flammable.
The students were out because they were absolutely outraged at what was being done to them and to support their teachers. But they were not attacking the police or anyone else physically, and they ranged from 12-year-olds up to 18.
The police response was very violent, snatch squads, water cannon, baton charges, indiscriminate beatings. Many colleagues were utterly astounded. It was an eye opener, because the police were going for children who were not a threat in any way to people. There had been violence in the last two years, but this was brutal.
It galvanised the Brussels teachers, forming peace lines between the kids and the police scum over several days of confrontations. The same scenes wre repeated in Namur - also weak in terms of strike action - where local government closed the schools. In a sense, the children showed the more industrially disorganised teachers the right road: out!
By contrast, in Liège, we had a de facto truce with the police. The city government is opposed to the cuts. They're not going to do anything about them, but they have no real objection to our protest, and the municipal police have (for now) backed off. There is ongoing individual harassment, seemingly stemming from cops with connections to a manager. A manager actually hit a picket with a car, but, don't forget, it's us teachers who are violent, right? They also backed up the sheriffs.
The first sheriffs we saw were privately employed by a parent at a posh school who happened to be linked to a Tory government minister. For 500 euros they had the pleasure of sending a court mandated sheriff to break the picket. More on that later. The later wave of sheriffs came when we blocked the exams. Again more on that later.
We had a highly effective strike committee where all the active schools were represented - an unofficial committee, the union leadership had nothing to do with it. There was at least one rep from each school, and they would alternate. It was a very practical affair: who needs help, what's going on, deconstructing management bullshit, avoiding bad agreements.
The initial organisers were from those few vocational schools who'd been on strike two years before. The committee would meet bi-weekly to weekly, depending on events, with about 30 schools represented by the end.
There were motions formulated from the strike committee that were then disallowed bureaucratically in the union general assemblies. Nonetheless, this comittee led the strike. Mostly it was a very practical affair. Strategy evolved, and exchanged tactics and practical help. The different conditions of struggle - some schools are harder to organise for multiple reasons - would initially lead to divergence on tactics and barriers to collective mandates. Many were at first hesitant when the need to stop the exams ourselves became clearer.
The arguments were won. Constantly the idea that each school's "reality" was not the same got in the way. No, cuts are universal!
My school had a lot of people available for picketing, and because it's a Pédagogie Active school, everyone thinks we're Che Guevara. So activists in a school would say: We need help. Send 20 lunatics. And it worked. We had concerts. We had a band. We had singers, a demented singing baker; we recycled all the things we do for the school fete. Also, some professional musicians turned up and started doing songs with us on picket lines.
We would turn up in the morning at six or seven to catch the workers trying to sneak in early, and stayed there until the head teacher closed the school. The record was 09:46. We had a few hard nuts, but nowhere was uncontested, and no secondary school could open.
In the early stages, the students were a fundamental part of the movement. They turned up and helped block the schools. Later on they actually saved one picket from being broken. Sheriffs (huissiers) were on our case, and then a thousand kids came and filled the road! The head teacher's shoulders sank, the rented dogs of the rich drove off, and another one bit the dust!
The strike committee and the pickets were the best team building ever.
The strike lasted seven weeks, and it got very hot, and the students are kids, and so understandably were not at the pickets at six in the morning every morning. They did support us, but their motives were varied, and not going to school was a big one.
We had a parents' evening at my school during the strikes, for parents of the children of the key exam years. The gym was full, and one guy started saying like, "What are you doing?" Then another parent interrupted: "I am pleased that that the teachers are anti-capitalist!" Round of applause. Very heartening.
Online, in the Facebook world, there was parent opposition; but there was a considerable amount of support online as well; and on the ground parent opposition to us was zero.
After we'd been on strike three weeks, and most of Wallonia [French-speaking Belgium] was affected, officials were still trying to say, "No, all the kids are going to take exams"
In Belgian secondary schools, students take end-of-year exams, set by external authorities but run and marked by the schools, in years 2, 4, and 6 (age 14, 16, 18). They are pass-fail exams, and usually over 80% pass. If a student fails, they may have to repeat a year.
We said: how can these children take these exams? They've been out of school for three weeks. What is the pedagogic value of these exams? Zero. We voted to stop the exams happening.
They had a system whereby guards brought the papers for various schools to a safe-deposit site, and then the head teachers were supposed to go there to pick up the papers.
We found out where the safe-deposit sites were, and we had nigh-on 24 hour pickets in some places. We won. In one case we managed even to talk round the exams organiser for the region who barracked his superiors: "This can't be done. You can't have these exams".
There seemed to be in some kind of agreement with the union and the local government that there will be no primary school action. Primary schools have slightly different regulations in terms of the law. There is a minimum service required and picketing has to be sensitive. You can picket, though, again showing how important it is to communicate to members what they can do, not just a list of don'ts that discourage any action.
One union full-timer, in charge of primaries, would walk into primaries that had started strikes and tell them to lift their pickets. Strike breakers! Union strike breakers!
In the end, the primary schools, apart from a few cases, didn't come out. Reversing this will be high on the "to do" list next term.
We had a members' meeting about a week before the end of term where we had an overwhelming two-thirds vote to strike from 24 August. The union leadership immediately tried to make that into an advisory suggestion, as opposed to saying the general assembly had voted for it.
Of course, you have meetings at the school or on the picket rather, and that's where you make your decisions. Nonetheless a thumping majority in a general assembly cannot just be a mild "suggestion".
My school strike meetings were for me the most eye-opening part of the strike. There was more democracy in those meeting than I've seen anywhere else in my life - certainly more than at work, and we’re supposedly a progressive school.
Probably different schools will do different things during the first week back. My own school wants to have the first day as strike, but on the second day to greet the first years. I'm worried about that becoming a management tactic for walking us back in. In a more optimistic view, I think we've gone too far to climb back in the box. Sustained strike action really changes people.
Considerable numbers of teachers have been sacked in the meantime, i.e. not had their contracts renewed. That is one of the things that we've been fighting. In Belgium, you have to teach for several years before getting "nomination" to a permanent position. "Nomination" is also one of the things being ripped up.
The official plan that the teachers teaching the older kids will have extra two hours added to their lesson-load. That's played in the media as lazy teachers being called to account, but what it actually means is considerable number of teachers are going to lose their jobs.
There are many lessons.
• While in no way replacing the union, rank and file organisation can overcome, browbeat and force legal cover from even the shittest bureaucracy. Lead yourselves.
• Students are great. They are cavalry!
• Laws against trade unionism become brittle in struggle and are there to be broken. The state's agents don’t always obey the state, and workers by argument at the picket or by force of numbers can bend those arms of the state until they break. Courts are for fools. No re-runs in the class struggle!
• Once a strike starts, keep the union leadership as far away from decision making as you can. Keep them away from pickets.
• Trade unions are organised so as to make action between sectors as hard as possible, even within the same industry. Cut out the middle-men and talk to the base, at the factory gate, the bus depot or the next school. Reps at those work places are often waiting for you with open arms.
• Defeats or false starts are practice and preparation. 18 months later we have seen the fruits of our efforts.
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