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Workers and supporters at a rally to mark two years on the picket line at the Pacific Gateway Hotel in Richmond, British Columbia, May 25, 2023. (Emma Arkell)
The owners of a Vancouver-area hotel raked in millions from government programs while workers have been on the picket line for over two years, resulting in Canada’s longest ongoing strike.
Since March 2020, over 140 workers at the Pacific Gateway Hotel — recently rebranded as a Radisson Blu — have been laid off, only to be subsequently fired. The firings disproportionately impacted racialized women, some of whom worked at the hotel for decades.
Pardeep Thandi rallies with her coworkers to mark two years on strike on May 25, 2023. Thandi worked at the Pacific Gateway Hotel for nearly two decades before her position was terminated in May 2021. (Emma Arkell)
Kevin Wu had been working at the Richmond, British Columbia hotel as a night auditor since 2011. At a rally in December 2022 to mark the workers’ second Christmas on strike, Wu described how difficult it has been for many of his coworkers to make ends meet since March 2020.
“They have a family to raise, they have to put food on the table, they have to pay the rent or their mortgage — it has been tough for everyone,” said Wu.
But Wu said that he and his coworkers refuse to back down.
“We know if we give up right now, all the things we’ve done for the past nineteen months will be just for nothing,” said Wu. “So we’re going to keep on fighting till we get a good result for us and we can bring everyone back.”
Just weeks after workers were told that there was no work for them at the hotel in March 2020, the hotel owners notified workers through an internal company app that the hotel would be used as a quarantine site managed by a federal government agency and staffed by the Red Cross.
The quarantine facility contract with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) was extended on a month-to-month basis. While the workers were initially covered by their recall rights — essentially a guarantee that laid-off workers would be offered their old jobs should they become available again within a certain time frame — the contract extensions outlasted those rights.
In December 2020, the hotel owners refused to extend the workers’ recall rate, and the workers’ union, UNITE HERE Local 40, sounded the alarm.
Not all hotels responded to the tumult of the pandemic in the way the Pacific Gateway did. Other hotels in British Columbia that hosted quarantine facilities rehired and retrained their workforces to staff the facilities rather than bringing in contractors. In September 2021, UNITE HERE Local 40 and the bargaining agent for over thirty hotels and resorts in British Columbia reached a recall agreement. This agreement guaranteed that laid-off workers would be recalled until either July 1, 2023, or until the pandemic was declared over by the World Health Organization.
In early May 2021, the remaining workforce at the Pacific Gateway went on strike in solidarity with their laid-off coworkers. Over two years later, they’re still on the picket line. Over the twenty-one months that the hotel was used as a quarantine site, the hotel owners are estimated to have made around $33.6 million dollars from the PHAC contract.
Santa Claus walks the Pacific Gateway Hotel picket line in December 2022. (Emma Arkell)
Michelle Travis, research director for UNITE HERE Local 40, said that the union estimated that amount based on what’s been revealed about other quarantine hotel contracts: documents released by Calgary, Alberta Conservative Party MP Michelle Rempel-Garner revealed that the Westin Calgary hotel was contracted at a rate of $120 per room per night. Both the Pacific Gateway Hotel and the Westin Calgary are owned by PHI Hotel Group.
On the picket line in the fall of 2021, workers said that they suspected that there weren’t many people staying at the Pacific Gateway: they traded stories of driving by the hotel in the evening and not seeing any lights on. Those suspicions were validated by documents acquired by Vancouver-Kingsway New Democratic Party MP Don Davies. In September and October 2021, the Pacific Gateway saw a total of only fifteen people quarantined. Over the twenty-one-month contract, 2,204 travelers quarantined at the hotel.
In late January 2022, members of parliament contacted the union to inform it that the contract between the owners of the Pacific Gateway and the PHAC was nearing its end.
In a statement to Richmond News, a PHAC spokesperson said that the agency was “no longer doing business with Pacific Gateway Hotel” and that the hotel’s actions “were concerning,” in reference to its “treatment of unionized workers.”
On February 1, the hotel posted job ads online looking to replace laid-off workers.
In the first months of the pandemic, the Canadian government rolled out several benefit programs to support workers and businesses impacted by the pandemic. By far the largest of these benefits was the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), which provided a 75 percent wage subsidy for eligible employers for up to three months. According to a report by the auditor general of Canada, by the program’s close in October 2021, the CEWS provided more than $100 billion to over 440,000 employers, making it the largest government spending initiative in Canadian history.
An archived page on the government of Canada website states that the CEWS “prevents further job losses, encourages employers to re-hire workers previously laid off as a result of COVID-19, and help [sic] better position Canadian companies and other employers to more easily resume normal operations following the crisis.”
Despite laying off 70 percent of the Pacific Gateway’s workforce, both PHI Hotel Group and Van-Air Holdings Ltd., two entities with ownership stake in the hotel, received money from the CEWS, according to the searchable CEWS registry. In a report on pandemic support programs, the auditor general noted that while the CEWS supported employers in sectors hit hardest by the pandemic’s economic downtown, it was ultimately difficult to assess how effective the program was because of the “limited information” employers were required to submit when applying. As the report notes, “the program did not require employers to submit any information on rehiring.”
The report identified $15.5 billion in CEWS payments that should be investigated further. In January 2023, the head of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) told members of Parliament that it “wouldn’t be worth the effort” to fully review the flagged ineligible payments. An investigation by the Globe and Mail found many CEWS recipients “posted solid results, paid out higher dividends, had money to spare for acquisitions and laid off workers to contain costs.”
Meanwhile, the CRA has contacted over one million Canadians requiring them to repay payments received through the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, which provided Canadians who lost work due to the pandemic with $2,000 per month.
For workers like Wu, hearing about the money that went into the hotel owners’ hands during the pandemic — while he and his fellow workers have been out on the picket line — is frustrating. “We all know that the owner benefited from the federal government during the pandemic,” said Wu. “At least give us a fair contract, right?”
Last time the owners of the hotel and UNITE HERE were at the bargaining table was in May 2021. Travis said that the owners tabled a “deeply concessionary contract” that proposed decreases in pay, fewer benefits, and worse working conditions.
“The employer wanted to roll back some of the workers’ pay from a living wage to minimum wage,” said Travis. “Under the contract, housepersons were making $21.73/hour, so that would have meant a $6.53 reduction in hourly pay under the owner’s proposal.”
Sukhi Rai, owner of Jayen Properties, of which PHI Hotel Group is an affiliate, told the Tyee that the layoffs were a result of plans to phase out food and beverage services at the hotel. But according to Travis, the layoffs were not limited just to workers in food and beverage services.
UNITE HERE Local 40 president Zailda Chan gives a speech outside the hotel on May 25, 2023. (Emma Arkell)
“He terminated 90 percent of the housekeeping department, and there were other departments that were hard hit. It’s not just food and beverage,” said Travis. “It really cut across departments.”
“You can’t run a four-hundred-room hotel without any housekeeping staff.”
Earlier this year, the hotel rebranded as a Radisson Blu. Since reopening the hotel to the public, the Radisson Blu has been undergoing renovations, and is currently operating with fewer rooms available to the public.
UNITE HERE Local 40 is encouraging the public to boycott the hotel. The British Columbia Federation of Labour, the Canadian Labour Congress, and Richmond City Council have all committed to not doing business with the hotel until a resolution is reached with the workers.
For workers like Wu, the support from members of other unions is heartening. “They all really support us in this fight,” he says.
On May 25, at the two-year strike anniversary rally in front of the Radisson Blu, UNITE HERE Local 40 president Zailda Chan spoke on the picket line about the resilience of the hotel workers. “No matter what you call this hotel, it’s the workers that have made this hotel successful and they’re not going anywhere until they get back in there and they raise their standards.”
The raising of the issue of a constitution as a potential way out of the political impasse over the future of Israel’s legal system is nothing but a red herring on the part of the opponents of judicial reform.
By Martin Sherman
I don’t think it is right for the Supreme Court to change fundamental things in accordance with what it refers to as the judgment of ‘the reasonable person.’ That’s an amorphous and completely subjective definition that the Knesset never introduced to the legal code –Yair Lapid, articulating his opposition to the reasonableness clause.
If the reasonableness clause is abolished, all lines will have been crossed. It will demolish the authority of the Supreme Court and our democratic structure—Yair Lapid, articulating his support for the reasonableness clause.
As the obsessive, borderline-maniacal Bibi-phobic opponents of judicial reform continue with their destructive and lawless demonstrations-cum-riots across the streets of Israel, protesting all—and any—government decisions of which they disapprove—whether major changes in the judicial system, minor changes in the judicial system, the dismissal of elected ministers or appointed bureaucrats—a new demand is emerging as a panacea-like balm for the nation’s tribulations.
This is the idea of a Constitution for Israel. Usually touted as to be based on Israel’s Declaration of Independence, it is suggested that the formulation of such a constitution would placate the demonstrators opposing the coalition’s legislative initiatives.
A constitution for Israel is a seductive idea and gives the impression of adopting the example of the USA, the leader of the democratic world. But it is also a highly deceptive notion—being far more declarative than substantive in terms of being an effective template that determines the functioning of the political system.
For, the existence of a constitution is no guarantee of individual rights or civil liberties or any of the enlightened goals that the opponents of judicial reform profess to cherish.
Indeed, a brief jaunt through Google would reveal that countries such as the USSR (and later, Russia), North Korea, and Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso) all boast constitutions that include(d) an array of lofty human rights. Yet the demonstrators are very unlikely to endorse any of these states as a model democracy for Israel to emulate.
Thus, it should be clear to any serious student of political science that an authentically substantive constitution cannot, in and of itself, create societal values. On the contrary, it can only reflect them. For if it does not, it will remain nothing more than a worthless piece of paper, bearing meaningless words and empty promises.
Just how irrelevant the text of a constitution can be, when it does not rest on values a society embodies, is vividly portrayed by the words of the 1991 Rwandan Constitution, formulated just three years prior to the brutal genocide that ripped through that luckless country. It read: “The National Council for Development, meeting as Constituent Assembly …Faithful to democratic principles and concerned about ensuring the protection of human rights and promoting respect for fundamental freedoms, in accordance with the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’… Does establish and adopt this Constitution for the Republic of Rwanda…”
Of course, the terrible carnage that followed soon after the instatement of the constitution served to underscore the staggering distance that can separate noble words and benign intentions from the gory realities in several “constitutional democracies.”
To illustrate the point, consider Article 31, of Burkina Faso’s 2015 Constitution, which proclaims that “Burkina Faso is a democratic, unitary and secular State. Faso is the republican form of the State.” Yet, describing realities on the ground, Human Rights Watch paints a dour picture: “Burkina Faso’s human rights situation seriously deteriorated in 2022 as deadly attacks by Islamist armed groups against civilians surged, military forces and pro-government militias committed violations during counterterrorism operations, and political instability deepened as a result of two military coups.”
Accordingly, with religious radicalism, government abuses, and military rebellion, so much for a “democratic”, “unitary” and “secular” State as optimistically set out in the Constitution.
This all goes to underscore the vast potential disconnect between the formal structure of a national polity and the mode of its substantive political routine.
Take Pakistan for example. The formal structure of the Pakistani political system has many similarities with that of the US.
Like the US, Pakistan has a bicameral legislature, a federal system of government, a president elected separately from parliament, and a constitution, which purports to ensure civil rights.
Yet Pakistan is only in the 102nd place (out of a total of 164 counties) in the 2023 Democratic Index Rankings. Significantly, the US ranks 26th, below Israel in 23rd place! (This finding is not a quirk of this particular ranking system.
Indeed, very similar results emerge from an alternative 2023 assessment, with Israel surpassing the US democracy score, while Pakistan—despite its president, bicameral legislature, federal system, and constitution—ranks far lower than both.)
Of course, the converse is no less telling. Just as a formal constitution is no guarantee of substantively democratic governance, so the lack of a formal constitution does not necessarily mean the lack of democratic governance.
Thus, eminently democratic countries such as New Zealand, Britain, and Canada—like Israel—do not have a formal constitution. Yet this has not prevented them from providing their citizens with political freedoms and human rights that are among the most comprehensive on the face of the globe.
Of course, the raising of the issue of a constitution as a potential way out of the political impasse over the future of Israel’s legal system is nothing but a red herring on the part of the opponents of judicial reform. A constitution has been an elusive ideal of Israel, literally from its very inception. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding document, stipulates that a constitution should be drawn up by October 1948—yet for three-quarters of a century it has not been formulated because of hitherto unbridgeable fissures in Israeli society.
However, despite not having a formal constitution, Israel has for almost eight decades, developed, progressed, prospered, and withstood changes of government, political assassination, grave external threats, and internal unrest, while managing to provide its citizens with domestic freedoms and material welfare among the highest in the world.
So while, in principle, a formal constitution may be a worthy objective, its absence has hardly precluded democratic governance or economic development. Moreover, the opponents of judicial reform know full well that just as no agreement could be reached with them on the reforms, no agreement with them will be possible on the content of an overarching constitution for the country, which would go well beyond the scope of the judicial system and extend to many other walks of life in Israel, over which there are also deep divides.
Accordingly, the offer of the advancement of a formal constitution for Israel in exchange for dialing down the maliciously and mendaciously choreographed protests against judicial reform is nothing but a devious deception to delay the advancement of the reform. Indeed it is an offer that those proposing it cannot deliver on—nor do they wish to.
As such it, should be robustly rebuffed.
Dr. Martin Sherman spent seven years in operational capacities in the Israeli defense establishment. He is the founder of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a member of the Habithonistim-Israel Defense & Security Forum (IDSF) research team, and a participant in the Israel Victory Project
The post ‘Excuse du jour’: Israeli protesters demand a constitution – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.
Three Arabs from northern Israel were arrested for terrorist plot against security personnel.
By Pesach Benson, TPS
Israeli authorities arrested an adult and two minors from the Nazareth area for planning to carry out terror attacks inspired by Hamas, police announced on Monday as indictments were filed.
Indictments were due to be filed on Monday in the Nazareth District Court.
An investigation by the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) and the Israeli Police found that the three produced Molotov cocktails which they planned to throw at security forces.
The adult was identified as Mobin Ahmed Younes, a 19-year-old resident of Reina, an Arab village adjacent to Nazareth. The minors were only identified as from northern Israel.
The 19-year-old Younes frequented the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount during Ramadan and participated rallies while wearing the terror group’s flag. He was also filmed inside Al Aqsa expressing his identification with Hamas.
Tensions on the Temple Mount were high during the Islamic month of Ramadan, which overlapped with the weeklong Jewish Passover holiday. Palestinians barricaded inside the Al Aqsa Mosque were evacuated by Israeli police.
In another case, one of the suspects was photographed on the roof of a house in his village holding a weapon and wrapped in Hamas flags.
The indictments added that the three actively read material written by Hamas.
Palestinian terror are known for exploiting social media to recruit children.
“The terrorist organization Hamas continues to work to spread its ideology among the citizens of the State of Israel and its residents and, among other things, works to recruit them through propaganda distributed on the Temple Mount and on social networks, with the aim of promoting terrorist activity in Israel,” the Shin Bet said in a statement announcing the arrests.
The post Adult, 2 minors arrested in Nazareth for planning Hamas-inspired attacks appeared first on World Israel News.
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Depiction of the harbor in Bruges, Belgium. (Photo12 / UIG / Getty Images)
Between 1300 and 1600, only the Italian city-states could rival the artisanal industries, commerce, and artistic production of the southern Low Countries. This is common knowledge to anyone familiar with the history of art.
Its medieval townscape is still visible to the foreign visitor in popular historic Belgian cities such as Bruges, Brussels, Ghent, and Antwerp. Equally famous are the region’s visual artists of the so-called Northern Renaissance: Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, and Peter Paul Rubens, not to mention lesser-known female artists like Clara Peeters.
It is less well known that between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, there was a very high frequency of popular collective action in principalities like the County of Flanders, the Duchy of Brabant, and the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. Indeed, fourteenth-century Flanders was probably the preindustrial region with the highest intensity and frequency of workers’ protest and civil warfare.
This article will give readers an overview of social unrest in Flanders during the Middle Ages and discuss the factors behind it against the wider backdrop of popular protest in medieval Europe.
The southern part of the medieval Low Countries roughly covered the area of what is today Belgium and Luxembourg as well as the most northern regions of France and a small southern part of the Dutch kingdom. It was a densely urbanized area. By 1300, the share of the population living in towns is estimated to have been somewhere between 30 and 40 percent — much higher than the average in medieval Europe.
The two most famous upheavals were the rising that led in 1302 to the Battle of Courtrai, in which a militia mostly composed of rebellious Bruges artisans defeated a French chivalric force that was the strongest army in medieval Europe, and the revolt of Maritime Flanders between 1323 and 1328.
In 1297, under the pretext of a conflict over feudal rights with his vassal Count Guy of Dampierre, the king of France had his troops invade the prosperous County of Flanders. His real objective was to get hold of the region’s economically booming cities and the fiscal income they provided. The Flemish merchant class supported the French invaders, having been in conflict with their count for some time.
The artisans of Ghent and Bruges at first remained passive toward the invasion. In 1301, however, they began protesting against unjust taxation. The members of the Flemish comital family who still held on to a small part of the county saw this as an opportunity to forge an alliance with Pieter de Coninck, a weaver and rebel leader of Bruges.
Fourteenth-century Flanders was probably the preindustrial region with the highest intensity and frequency of workers’ protest and civil warfare.
On July 11, 1302, this alliance of “odd bedfellows” destroyed the French army. Although the Flemish had to negotiate an unfair peace treaty, they remained independent. Most importantly, common artisans now also had representation in the urban governments.
Some years later, however, the comital family felt increasingly uneasy about their alliance with the workers and small producers and started siding once again with the patricians and the French royal family. This caused new unrest among the working masses, and ever more so among the peasants, who also had reasons to revolt against taxation.
Between 1323 and 1328, this led to a new major revolt that united the lower and middle classes of most of Flanders against the new count, who was at one point held prisoner by his own subjects. But he eventually crushed the rebellion with French aid, and the cities and rural districts once again had to pay heavy fines.
Historians often see the popular victory of 1302 as a key moment for the securing of Flemish autonomy from the region’s feudal overlord, France. In this light, it has frequently been misrepresented as a national struggle rather than a class one. Yet it was primarily caused by deep social tensions between the urban artisan and merchant classes of Flanders.
The revolt of 1323–28 is usually compared to the French Jacquerie of 1358 or the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It is now generally acknowledged that all three of these so-called “peasant risings” also included urban workers and members of the middle classes.
Yet Marxist medieval historians have tended to focus on rural society, trying to anatomize the productive relations of feudal society almost exclusively in the rural context. In fact, social revolts were much more frequent in the towns and cities of Flanders, Brabant, and Liège than in the countryside, and the same can also be said of other European regions.
Medieval towns generally do not receive the same attention as the countryside from the viewpoint of historical materialism. They do not easily fit into a conventional view of the feudal mode of production as a system with a class of lords appropriating the surplus from peasants under the weight of extra-economic pressure, whether those peasants were classified as serfs or as freemen or as occupying a wide range of juridical and social statuses located between those two poles.
Of course, there is some justification for this focus on rural life. In the average region of medieval Europe, the population living in towns did not exceed 10 percent of the total. But cities were not “non-feudal islands in a sea of feudalism,” as the historian Michael Postan once put it. They were integral to the social formations of medieval Europe, certainly from the eleventh century onward.
The classic Marxist debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, involving figures such as Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, and Robert Brenner, did not have to say a lot about the medieval town. The leading Marxist historian of medieval society, Rodney Hilton, only systematically reflected on the modes of production in the small market towns of England and France toward the end of his career. With some justification, he considered these towns to have been the most typical forms of urban life in this period.
Medieval towns generally do not receive the same attention as the countryside from the viewpoint of historical materialism.
This leaves the Marxist approach to history with a paradox. Medieval urban economy and society constituted a distinctive social formation combining different relations of production, particularly in the more important centers such as Florence, Venice, Ghent, or Bruges. Yet town and countryside were also in constant interaction.
City dwellers obviously depended for foodstuffs on the surplus produced by the peasants of the surrounding countryside. The larger the population of a town, the larger the hinterland that produced for it.
The same point held true for sources of energy and construction material such as wood and peat, and for many raw materials that were used in the artisanal industries of the towns. Moreover, since the level of mortality was always higher than birth rates in the preindustrial city, urban areas also needed a constant influx of migrants to maintain or increase their population.
We can use the medieval County of Flanders as an example of a feudal society with a very strong urban element that will shed light on the wider theoretical problem. Flanders was situated in a flat landscape, at the delta of several major rivers, and in a central position between France, Germany, and Britain. At first underdeveloped and infertile, this swampy region on the North Sea experienced spectacular economic growth during the Middle Ages, especially from the eleventh century onward.
This growth was the result of two factors: a strong and steady rise in agricultural productivity, which created a demographic surplus, and the development of a vigorous export-oriented textile industry and an urban service economy for trade. While the first element was also present in some other European regions, the second was much less common, even in Italy, where the towns were less industrial than those of Flanders.
In cities like Ghent and Ypres, between a third and a half of the population worked in one industrial sector, the cloth industry, by 1200. Bruges became the hub for north-west European trade and its connection to the Mediterranean.
In cities like Ghent and Ypres, between a third and a half of the population worked in one industrial sector, the cloth industry, by 1200.
Early medieval growth in the period between c. 700 and c. 1150 seems to have been primarily created by elite demand, as Chris Wickham has convincingly argued. The warrior class and the clergy appropriated the agricultural surplus produced when the European economy began to undergo a gradual revival from the eight century onward. They used that surplus to purchase luxury products and imported commodities in general.
From the eleventh century, however, city dwellers themselves became a growing domestic market for their own artisanal production. At the same time, commodities produced in regions like Flanders also reached extensive interregional and international markets.
However, the rise of medieval industry markets did not imply the existence of capitalism. In Marxist terminology, “simple commodity production” refers to an artisan mode of manufacturing. The producer owns the means of production, which may often be just a small workshop, some tools, and a modest amount of raw material with which to make his finished product. This commodity is subsequently sold on the market, often directly to the consumers.
Medieval shoemakers or bakers are clear examples of petty commodity producers in their pure and simple form. But in the case of Flemish cloth production for export, the division of labor and the relations within the sphere of production arising from it were more complicated.
While commercial capital did not directly intervene in the production process, merchants had a firm grip on small producers through credit and their ability to set prices for raw materials and finished products, not to mention their control of political power in the towns. This remained the case even if the small producers formally possessed their own means of production. For their part, wage workers were dependent on both merchants and master artisans who acted as entrepreneurs.
In the years between 1050 and 1150, roughly speaking, the “communal movement” resulted in a high degree of political and legal autonomy for the urban areas. This was not a real social revolution that brought a new class to power through violent confrontation.
In most Flemish cities, princes and the early patrician elites of merchants and landowners shared a common interest in the growth of the urban economy, which led to profits for the merchant class and greater fiscal income for the prince. Only in ecclesiastical towns like Tournai, situated right next to Flanders, were there some violent clashes when ruling bishops did not want to share power with the burghers. We can observe the same pattern in a number of other ecclesiastical towns located in France and the Holy Roman Empire.
However, when a succession crisis arose in Flanders in 1127–28, as described by the eloquent chronicler Galbert of Bruges, it was the major cities such as Bruges, Ghent, and Saint-Omer that acted as kingmakers. By then, they had already developed considerable economic and military power and political influence that was too strong for the nobles to successfully resist.
Between 1225 and 1250, the first labor strikes are documented in towns like Douai and Ghent, earlier than anywhere else in medieval Europe.
The great majority of Flemish peasants had obtained personal freedom by the thirteenth century, and the seignorial power of the nobility dwindled. The ruling class in the communes consisted of merchants, descendants of seignorial officials, local knights, and urban landowners. Urban society polarized, especially in the years between 1150 and 1300. The urban merchant classes took advantage of cheap migrant labor from the countryside to keep wages low and accumulate capital.
Food had to be imported in ever larger quantities to feed the urban workforce. Prices increased and wages lagged behind. Between 1225 and 1250, the first labor strikes are documented in towns like Douai and Ghent, earlier than anywhere else in medieval Europe. At first, artisans were not organized, or organized merely in religious confraternities. The merchant elites who jealously monopolized political power forbade independent craft guilds or even meetings of workers.
Particularly in large towns such as those in medieval Flanders, the combination of small commodity production and commercial capitalism thus fundamentally changed the outlook of the feudal social formation across the entire region. Class structure became more complicated than the opposition between lords and peasants alone. Already by the twelfth century, many merchant capitalists and urban landowners were becoming wealthier than the nobility. A number of commodity producers obtained middle-class status and also sought political power.
Making use of the craft guild as an organizational form, artisans demanded institutional autonomy, control over the production process, and participation in urban government. The constant flow of rural migrants provided the towns with an army of proletarians, who populated the fast-growing suburbs from the twelfth century onward.
Merchants, small entrepreneurs, and wage workers developed triangular class relations and formed various temporary political alliances. Guildsmen working for the local market were less proletarianized than those in the cloth industry. Working women in particular, often single, were the most exploited of all urban social groups.
Yet it was a united front of small entrepreneurs, retailers, and wage workers that faced the patrician regimes in successive waves of revolt around 1280 and 1302. In the most industrious cities like Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen, and Liège, more popular governments came to power — that is to say, ones that included artisan representatives (even if they belonged to the richer layers of their guilds).
The next two and a half centuries were marked by a constant struggle between these “popular fronts” or “burgher movements” on the one hand and the class of commercial capitalists on the other. The latter often received support from wealthy petty commodity producers — in the luxury industries, for example — as well as from princely, noble, and ecclesiastical power.
Ghent became the center of artisan strength in medieval Europe.
The fourteenth century was the apogee of guild power in Flanders and Liège. Ghent became the center of artisan strength in medieval Europe. In the Brabantine towns, where the alliance between the nobles and the patrician class was stronger, the struggle was more difficult, developing after 1360 and sometimes only succeeding by the beginning of the fifteenth century.
While it was the urban classes that led the social and political struggles of the medieval Low Countries, the free peasants of the coastal areas also played an active role at times. A notable example came in the uprising of Maritime Flanders between 1323 and 1328, as well as in 1379–85 and 1436–38, two periods when large parts of the countryside openly revolted against princely rule.
Free peasants also developed a culture of village meetings and rose up against excessive fiscal burdens, often siding with rebellious urban artisans. In other periods, however, these two social groups had opposing interests. Cities fiscally exploited their hinterlands, and the urban workforce saw rural industries, where wages were lower, as unfair competition that they wanted to suppress.
The rule of popular leader James of Artevelde (1338–45) as captain general of Ghent marked the high point of Flemish rebellious power. Although Artevelde was not a craftsman himself and belonged to the urban upper class of Ghent, he managed to obtain the support of the textile workers and most of the other artisans.
At the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, he sided with England against France, even though Flanders was a fief of the French monarchy. This was because the import of English wool was vital to the Flemish production of woolen cloths. Artevelde’s followers also took power in Bruges for several years.
During the second half of the fourteenth century, the textile industries of Flanders and Brabant entered a period of crisis. There was growing competition from England and Tuscany as well as from smaller towns and rural producers. A city like Bruges mainly reoriented its economic activity to the production of durable consumption goods and luxuries, making it the ideal place for painters like Jan van Eyck or Hans Memling to settle.
The Burgundian dynasty assumed power in most of the Netherlandish principalities between the late fourteenth and the mid-fifteenth century. This was part of a wider pattern in medieval Europe whereby the feudal state became stronger in relation to its subjects through the interplay of war and taxation. This increased strength applied to lords and cities alike.
During the second half of the fourteenth century, the textile industries of Flanders and Brabant entered a period of crisis.
During the fifteenth century, the power of the political guilds in Flanders was in retreat. Textile workers became ever more isolated from the commodity producers in other sectors who worked for internal markets. At the same time, the upper layers of the urban elites fused with an expanding cohort of state officials and nobles who profited from what we might term “state feudalism” — a more centralized form of surplus extraction through the appropriation of tax rather than rent. The fiscal burden placed by the feudal state upon its subjects became heavier during the later Middle Ages.
There was another generalized wave of uprisings between 1477 and 1492, after Duke Charles the Bold died on a battlefield against the Swiss, having overstretched in his plans for Burgundian expansion. The Flemish and Brabantine town-dwellers took advantage of the weakness of his young successor, Mary of Burgundy, to revolt. They demand the restoration of their former privileges.
Mary subsequently married Maximilian of Austria. After her untimely death in 1482, this marriage alliance brought the Habsburg dynasty to power in Flanders, but only after ten years of civil war. The opposition to Habsburg rule consisted not only of the popular classes in the cities but also of large sections of the elites, including many nobles.
In 1515, under the reign of Maximilian’s grandson Charles V, the Netherlands became part of the global Spanish-Habsburg empire. In a number of confrontations between 1525 and 1540, this centralized authority, much stronger than what had existed before, defeated the guildsmen.
The craft workers of the southern Netherlandish principalities had achieved a degree of political power in their towns, especially the larger ones, that was unrivaled in any other region of medieval Europe before 1400, with the possible exception of the Rhineland and some Italian city-states. By the middle of the sixteenth century, that power had been significantly weakened. Yet the Netherlands would soon produce a new wave of revolt in the wake of the Reformation, dealing a heavy blow to the superpower of early modern Europe, the Habsburg monarchy.