These actions will be targeted against energy tariffs, but also against the government, “accomplice of energy multinationals”. “While hundreds of thousands of families no longer know how to pay their bills, an energy group in Belgium does not care about the excavations”, namely Engie, with the complicity of the government”, he said in front of thousands of activists and sympathizers of the far-left party which is organizing a new edition of “Manifiesta” this weekend in Ostend. This gathering, both festive, embellished with a musical program in festival mode, and activities policies (debates and political speeches), attracted, according to the PTB, some 14,000 people.
Raoul Hedebouw (re)said all the evil he thought of the agreement reached with the government on Friday to help households facing an unprecedented energy bill.
“Magnette, De Croo, Van der Straeten, Van Peteghem, Rousseau, Bouchez are all talking today about price freezes and taxing the surplus profits of multinationals, but that’s blabla? They have decided on a small bonus of 200 euros. For two months… To come into our pockets, it’s decided in a few seconds, but to go into the pockets of Engie, 9 months and still nothing Worse, they have just decided “possibly by chance they no longer have a choice consider a tax on everything except? on the mega nuclear profits of Engie”, he commented.
The president of the PTB has once again accused the government of having a secret deal concluded with Engie-Electrabel in the middle of summer, when Alexander De Croo and Tinne Van der Straeten traveled to Paris for the extension of the two nuclear reactors . They accepted, according to him, the demand formulated by the management of Engie to make pay the bill for nuclear waste by the government and not to impose any serious taxation of its superprofits.
Incidentally, Raoul Hedebouw attacked the FEB, which is asking for a blocking of wages and their indexation. “What it does not say is that the automatic indexation of wages only partially compensates for the current record inflation, that it is domestic consumption that still saves growth a little in Belgium and that if wages are blocked, it is the purchasing power which decreases and therefore the expenses and orders in the stores or SMEs”, he added.
On stage before him, the president of the FGTB, Thierry Bodson, maintained the threat of a common front strike on November 9, “if the world of work is not heard on the drop in energy bills, the increase in wages and social allowances”.
The president of the socialist union judged that it was necessary to adapt the wage blocking law “because today, full-time work can no longer make life dignified. With part-time work, it is absolutely impossible”, a- he insisted, fixing an appointment in this context, at the demonstration on September 21 in Brussels.
Lut Cromphout, president of ACV Puls (the central employees of the Christian union), called for “a struggle, together, for a better future”.