Belgian workers staged the country’s first general strike in almost two decades Monday to protest a European Union meeting in Brussels. The strike shut down Belgium’s trains, buses, schools and the factories of many major companies including Audi, Volvo and Coca-Cola.

Marc Leemans, president of Belgium’s Christian Trade Union: “They impose a politics of austerity, and this is not creating a good perspective for Europe, because this is spreading, in fact, poverty in Europe. What we need is a policy that creates growth, that creates jobs. And if we don’t have that policy, then we will always have a very difficult situation, and we will get poorer and poorer. And that’s not the Europe we want.”