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Fun fact: in the 80′s the Dutch Unemployed Union held ‘fridge raids’ to protest against poverty.
They’d find out when a politician of big boss who upheld poverty and starvation wages was speaking at some public even, then they’d carefully break into his house with a LOT of people and they would eat EVERY piece of food in his house and leave the empty dished behind without taking anything else.
A lot has happened in activist history and very few of those stories can be found through a 5 minute google. Some were never even in the media and are only preserved in activist zines that are not included in major newspaper archives.
It’s okay to not assume that stories without sources are true, but stating that stories are bullshit because you were unable to verify them through an internet search is its own kind of ignorance, one that erases a lot of the history of activism because the media has never given a shit about us.
I am Dutch, so I went and looked through Dutch-language sources on it. Dutch media and historians aren’t as prone to shunning activism as their American counterparts are, so there was a good chance of finding them, provided I used the right search queries.
Turns out you’ve misrepresented them by calling them “Unemployed Union”. They were a youngster organisation within a national union, not necessarily unemployed. So my queries for “werklozenvakbond” and similar terms didn’t bring up anything.
I didn’t misrepresent shit. A looooooot of groups did ‘eat actions’ in those days, smartass. And most of them were completely ignored in the Dutch media just like the Dutch media still ignores most protests and actions today except for the biggest ones.
The Unemployment Union that I was reading about when I wrote this little fun fact was Unitas in Nijmegen, which was formed in 1978 by the Unemployment Commitee Nijmegen. It’s official name was ‘Werklozencentrum Unitas’, a more respectable eufemism which it had used to get funding in its early days but back in the day it functioned as a union for collective action. The only thing I could have done better when I wrote that little snippet was make it clear that ‘Dutch’ meant ‘from the Netherlands’ and not THE national unemployment union, which was not a thing.
I haven’t been able to find the specific zine about their break-ins that I had in my hand 2 years ago but here’s a zine where they report on one of their eat actions. In this action they all went into the Gemeentehuis Nijmegen and demanded free food:
All of this could have been a really fun conversation if you hadn’t started out accusing me of all sorts of shit for no fucking reason. Shees.
