What if we raise wages to address labor shortages?
A carte blanche from Nancy Nyffels and Olivier Malay, collaborators in the research department of the CSC Alimentation et Services.
Since the economic recovery, there has been a shortage of labor works in several sectors. In the Horeca, transport, service vouchers and for certain technical profiles of the industry, companies can no longer find enough workers. One of the government's strategies to solve this shortage and achieve an employment rate of 80% is to activate the long-term sick. We believe there are better, fairer and more sustainable ways to achieve this.
Certain jobs in short supply require increased training: this is particularly the case for technical profiles, computer scientists, researchers in biology or pharmaceuticals. For most manual trades, however, the problem lies elsewhere. These are jobs either very poorly paid or with difficult working conditions (or often both!). When you are paid 10 € per hour as in the Horeca, it is not surprising that companies have difficulty finding candidates.
Salary and working conditions
Let's take two concrete examples of sectors and propose solutions. The first concerns home cleaning staff (service vouchers). Workers in this sector are among the lowest paid in Belgium. This is notably due to the fact that journeys from one customer to another are not considered as working time and are therefore not remunerated. As a result, most people working in service vouchers (and they are mostly women) earn only €1,170 net at the end of the month, which is even below the poverty line (€1,248, according to the statistics office Statbel). It is therefore not surprising that this sector is among the list of sectors in shortage. If we want to solve this shortage, the most effective way is to improve the salary, or at the very least to pay better for travel.
But the salary is not everything: the working conditions also play a role. Let’s take the example of another shortage. In the food industry, the Aviko potato processing plant in West Flanders is looking for around 100 workers and fails to recruit as many. The problem is not just with this company, it is general in the sector. The work offered can indeed be tedious: the potatoes have to be sorted eight hours a day. Sometimes the job is to clean the black spots from it all day. In many companies, work is also done at night and on weekends. Combine that with the lowest wages in the food industry, and it's no wonder to find a labor shortage. Here, to solve it, we must also improve working conditions.
The example of garbage collectors
It's a question of supply and demand. If companies need a lot of workers, but the supply is limited because the positions are unattractive, the price of labor must rise to restore the supply-demand balance. And in this case, the price can be the salary, but also the quality of the work. For this, note that it is necessary to get out of the 1996 law on wages which freezes them de facto and prevents their increase, so as to solve the labor shortage. This would benefit both employers looking for staff and workers who sometimes struggle to finish the month.
Improving wages and working conditions works. For example, the profession of garbage collector, once poorly regarded in society, does not face a labor shortage, because the wages there are honest. If it was possible for this profession, it is also possible for the other so-called shortage professions. From Horeca to cleaning, via transport and industry, it is becoming urgent to revalorize all these professions.
Title, subtitle and intertitles are editorial. Original title: "Addressing the labor shortage"
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