Sharp rise in unemployment, especially in Flanders: national figure up 6.7% on a year ago
The monthly figures from the Belgian employment agency, the RVA, showed that the number of people who were unemployed in March and receiving unemployment benefit surged 6.7 percent compared to a year ago. It’s the first time since January 2021 that there has been an increase of more than 5 percent.
The employment agency says it still remains to be seen whether this trend will continue in coming months, but there are signs showing this is the direction of travel: temporary unemployment remains high, the number of bankruptcies leading to job losses is increasing and business confidence has fallen.
In March, 295,953 unemployed job seekers received full unemployment benefit. The figure was up 18,596 compared to March 2023. The increase in Flanders (+12.4 percent) is much larger than in Wallonia (+2.9 percent) and Brussels (+5.1 percent).
Temporary unemployment surged 60.1 percent compared with a year ago resulting in a total 68,572 job seekers who signed on temporarily. The RVA does say that the number of temporary unemployed was relatively low a year ago. Under Belgium’s temporary unemployment system employers can get workers to sign on for a limited period when business is slack. In this way workers don’t need to be sacked and can return to the same job when business picks up.