Undermining the ‘Polder Model’: Workers’ Militancy and Trade-Union Leadership in Four Dutch Wildcat Strikes, 1963–1970

All over Europe, workers’ insubordination in the 1960s and 1970s became manifest in a growing number of wildcat strikes. In the Netherlands, under the guise of the so-called consensual ‘polder model’, trade unions were part of a repressive system of industrial relations. From 1963, rank-and-file opposition in ‘unofficial’ strikes forced the ‘official’ unions to abandon their support of restrictive wage policies. After a huge wildcat strike in the port of Rotterdam in 1970, the union leadership changed its policy and began to initiate strikes. In this article, rank-and-file mobilization and the union leaderships’ reaction are analysed in four wildcat strikes between 1963 and 1970. It concludes that in these strikes the union leadership and rank-and-file members, while opposed to each other, were also mutually dependent. The union leadership was forced to adapt to pressure from below, and strikers had to rely on the bargaining ability of union officials to reach an agreement with the employers. Both parties had to accept an involuntary symbiosis. In this way, the attachment of the trade-union leadership to the top-down consensus in the ‘polder model’ was undermined.