It’s time to say goodbye. huh? Goodbye? So I searched for words and remembered a column by colleague Marjoleine de Vos. Something with transience? But what exactly had she written? In the past – I started in journalism in 1984 – I had to search in a folder of clippings that I had put together. My own Google before google. Or I could ask a documentalist and he searched with a viewer in a stack of microfiches with photographed newspaper pages. Otherwise there were always the shelves: large folders with bound paper newspapers. That search was hard work.
Now I type a few keywords on nrc.nl and seconds later I have the column. Title: Between past, present and future† 2017. Marjoleine de Vos wrote how she cycled home from her new job and thought a bit with fear: “Would this be my life now?” Yes, that was my life, she concluded thirty years later.
The thirty years at NRC I didn’t make it. After 28 years I will stop this Tuesday. Own request. Towards other hobbies.
Also read: Was it really better before?
The last day is getting used to. There is no longer a desk strewn with paper and folders. My filing cabinet is also empty, having been cleared out a year ago due to an internal renovation. In addition, I haven’t been in the editorial office much for two years because of the pandemic. A few meters of paper archive with the themes of the last fifteen years disappeared in two wheelie bins before the renovation. Folders on topics in this section. pensions. corporate governance. banking crisis. private equity. Labor migration. Labor unions. industrial policy. Top incomes.
Then as I sat on the train home, my favorite reading spot, the themes gave way to names. Men and women who, sometimes unexpectedly, crossed my path. These were mostly loners, although some had large membership organizations behind them. They had one thing in common. They were activists. People like Pieter de Wind, who came forward more than twenty years ago because he felt that pensioners were being disadvantaged by the kongsi of employers and trade unions that ran the pension world. People like Peter Paul de Vries, director of the investor association VEB, who organized countervailing power against the dominance of directors and supervisory directors of large companies. People like Pieter Lakeman, who tirelessly fought questionable accounting practices in court. People like Masja Zwart, FNV director, who campaigned to help unjust migrant workers.
Activists like them personify opposing force in economic relations. Opposing forces that were weak or weakening or were previously not there at all, until activists stirred. Counterforce is indispensable in relation to the power of large companies, large employers and large pension funds. Power requires counterforce, because economics is a struggle. Battle for market share, battle for returns, battle for more pay or extra dividend, battle to be first in the market. Without the opposing forces, capitalism would slide into exploitation, simple as that. So thanks to the activists. The loners. The sleepers.
Saying goodbye is giving gratitude. First of all to the then editor-in-chief Peter Vandermeersch, who, on the intercession of Jan Meeus, entrusted me with this column in 2010. One High five for Maarten Schinkel, my colleague for 28 years, with whom I wrote this column day after day for years. Lucky coincidence brought us together.
Last best: Thanks to you, advertisers and subscribers, who make this newspaper, website and podcasts possible.
Menno Tamminga writes for the last time on this Tuesday about corporate policy and the economy.
#Meters #archive #wheelie #bins #years #NRC