Where fresh flowers are a luxury in most parts of the world, they are on every street corner in Amsterdam. Literally. And cheap too: a nice bouquet will set only you back around 7 euros. This ties nicely into the fact that we like things to be cheap.

Tulips

Jokes aside, the quality of flowers in .nl is awesome and we are lucky because of it. The florists have been very succesful at marketing the message that you “say it with flowers” (zeg het met bloemen, since replaced by the current slogan gek op bloemen – crazy about flowers). Hordes of tourists come to our Keukenhof, which really is quite spectacular to see. Every other year an event called the Floriade is held, showcasing old and current flowers in a big way.

Marketplace

The biggest marketplace for flowers is called Flora Holland. This is an auction where grower meets wholesale. The scale of this operation is immense: every day at 5 AM or so a fleet of trucks comes in and unloads the flowers, the same day a different fleet leaves the terrain and ships the flowers worldwide. The fact that they are immediate neighbours of our largest airport Schiphol helps, too. On a smaller scale, flowers can be purchased on regular markets, in supermarkets, gas stations and on just about every streetcorner in large city centers. Amsterdam even has it’s own flower market (Google Image Search) where you can buy either fresh cut flowers or bulbs, ready to be taken on your airplane home.

Pink Gerbera

So where do all these flowers grow? During spring and summer, huge polders near Aalsmeer and Lisse are dedicated to flowers. Funny thing though. The flowers themselves are cut and discarded. It’s the bulbs they are after. This is the reason this part of Holland is called “bulb area” (bollenstreek). The flowers you can buy are also grown in the bollenstreek, but not on such a massive scale. You can buy flowers throughout the year in Netherlands, and this means in winter they are grown in greenhouses.

A very current discussion in .nl is the so-called ‘Balkenende norm’ or Balkenende income cap. Named after our current prime minister, this income level is deemed a reasonable maximum for anyone working in the public sector. Go over it and you are sure to be chastised. The media first, but the people quickly following.

People from the USA might find it disturbing: this income cap is a very real thing in our country. Set currently at about 160.000 euros (230k US$) this is inevitably your maximum wage if you work in the public sector. It doesn’t matter if your (privatised) company makes billions and/or if you take huge risks. ‘We’ are paying you so ‘we’ feel to have a right to maximise your salary.

It’s a sentiment most citizens across the world feel at some point, but we have managed to make it a norm.

The current discussion in .nl rages about salaries paid to CEOs in the health sector. In the last years, small parts of healthcare have been privatised and deregulated. This has brought with it all the nasty bits of capitalism: bean counters, middle management, time sheets and directors with huge salaries. In the past years some CEOs have managed to earn millions off semi-public services like home care.

I have to admit, it’s a little exorbitant.

Sorry about this picture of prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende, but he is name saint of this norm after all

The Balkenende norm is not law. Directors, even of public services, cannot be held to adhere it (only ministers of parliament and such, since they earn less than the prime minister by default). But the public outrage simply forces these people to yield to it eventually. (Or leave for the private sector, which many do.)

Private sector

There even exists a comparable norm for the private sector called the ‘Code Tabaksblat’. Named after a boardmember of Unilever, this code does not maximise salaries to that of Balkenende, but it does set rules for corporate governance, including salary. Invariably, media like de Volkskrant (people’s paper) will cry outrage when some CEO has managed to rake in millions while the stock of his company is tanking. In contrast to public sector workers though, this seldom affects salary levels. Most recent example of this is the paycheck of Anders Moberg, temporary CEO of Ahold, who had to give up a large percentage of his salary. Which still left him with many millions, of course.