Almost 3,000 job losses announced during the first quarter of 2021
During the first quarter of this year 36 companies across Belgium announced that they wanted to shed staff under the collective dismissal arrangement. Collective dismissal procedures are followed when more than 10 employees are to be made redundant in firms with between 20 and 100 staff, 10% of employees face the axe in companies with between 100 and 300 staff and at these 30 jobs are to be shed in companies with more than 300 people on the pay roll.
During the first three months of the year a total of 2,824 jobs were shed via the collective dismissal procedure. This compares to just 879 jobs that were lost under the same terms during the first quarter of last year. The figures come from the Federal Employment Department and appear in Saturday’s edition of the Francophone business newspaper L’Echo.
The restructuring at FedEx in Liège weighs heavily on the figures for Wallonia with a total of 1,097 people losing their jobs through collective dismissal there. In Flanders 922 jobs were lost using the procedure, while in Brussels this was 805.
During the whole of 2020 9,414 jobs were lost through collective dismissal.