This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Belgian prime minister has appealed to employers and trade unions to resume their negotiations over working conditions after a general strike forced the cancellation of flights across the country for the first time in its history, as well as a shutdown of schools and blockades at factories.

As Belgium ground to a halt in the face of the 24-hour national strike, the fifth in the last 25 years, Charles Michel said there was no alternative but to resume talks.

“Trade unions and employers must return to the negotiating table,” he said. “The strike does not solve anything. I want to thank all those who work today.”

The unions directing the action are calling for wage increases, an improved work-life balance, better pensions and earlier retirement ages.

Belgian airports were forced to cancel nearly all services after the country’s air traffic control body, Skeyes, shut airspace over the country for 24 hours from 10pm on Tuesday because of staff shortages.

The move caused flight disruption across Europe with Brussels airport, the country’s busiest hub, warning that the strike would affect about 60,000 people.



Elsewhere on Wednesday, dock workers were not loading or unloading ships in the port of Antwerp.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Workers use shopping trolleys to block the entrance to a Carrefour supermarket in Brussels. Photograph: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP

Kathleen Van De Vijver, a spokesman for the prisons service, said it had suffered a “major impact” with nearly two-thirds of guards off work, forcing authorities to restrict prisoners to their cells.

Brussels’ metro, tram and bus provider ran just a handful of lines and the national rail operator, SNCB, said about half its train services were running.

Companies picketed included Mercedes, Peugeot and Volvo, where the major factory in Ghent said it would not produce a single car as only 30 of its 6,000 staff had arrived for work.

In Antwerp, one-third of primary schools were closed and across the country many libraries, museums and sports institutions were shut.

Bart Bijnens of the ABVV union described the action as a “great success” as it highlighted workers’ anger at a planned government cap on wage increases to 0.8% over the next two years.

Paul Buekenhout from the Christian trade union criticised the quality of work and conditions on offer in Belgium’s airports, “both in the handling and in the airlines and the cleaning”.

Fouad Bougrine, of the liberal union, the ACLVB, said: “People do not like to drag luggage up until they are 67 years old. They also want to spend time with their grandchildren, for example – they are really angry.”

Michel has insisted the wage cap proposed by the central council of the economy does not take into account the indexing of salaries to the costs of living, which would see an “effective salary increase of 4.6%” by 2020.

In comments that were angrily denounced by strikers, the prime minister of Flanders, in the north of Belgium, attacked the unions for spreading “untruthful populism”.

Geert Bourgeois said: “Do I want to say with all these figures that there is no problem? Of course not. Every poor person is too much for me and we have to keep working on a warm and social Flanders. I just want to show that in this country, and certainly in Flanders, we have a very social society, which is only possible with a strong economy. Strong and social, that’s my motto.”