After the first coming consequences of the “Article 63§2” decree, the unemployed in Belgium are engaged in a social battle. This decree has been voted in 2011 by the socialist Di Ruppo government in Belgium, this without even consulting the parliament. The law was first applicated on january the 1st, 2012. It says in big terms that those who are older than 30 years and benefite from financial aid for unemployed, will no longer be financed for maximum 3 years. Since this law was aplicated first in 2012, only now in 2015 the first unemployed people with the age of 30 will feel the consequences.
Tens of thousands of people are recently excluded from the right to financial unemployment assistance called “insertion”. Many people are now organizing against the measure, requiring its cancellation, and fighting against the growing attacks on living conditions in generally – including the conditions of working.
These exclusions are not an economic necessity but a political measure, designed to worsen the charge and to flexibility of unemployed people looking for jobs. As usual, political speech is presenting unemployment as a result of individual problems, but in fact unemployment is a result of political decisions. Politics try to maintain pressure on the working classes at one side, by maintaining a reservoir of precarious people liable to do forced labour, at the other side by putting a big weight on the concern of “how to get rid of the misery of unemployment”.
The politics, the media and several experts on exlcusion communicated widely about the brutality of this measure (before foreign policy overwhelms news), the “Stop Article 63§2” coalition denounced the absurdity and injustice of this ministerial decree since its adoption. But still, many voices remain unheard, the voices of the most concerned, the unemployed.
Since four weeks, series of collective actions outlined practical points of the question. Several agencies of employment were occupied, protesters were invited to talk with the syndicates. At the employment agency ACTIRIS in Brussels, protesters confronted staff and unemployed with the brutal fact that economy does not need unemployed people. There they were received in a friendly manner by split tongues and by general secretaries and directors with hands tied by bad compromises.
Now collectives are fighting for the annulation of the 63§2 decree, for no further controls of employment searchers and the removal of the status of cohabitant (who lives together with other people in a house, receives less money from the employment agencies), its lower scale and administrative fictions it generates.
Translated out of french, original article on Indymedia Brussels .