jobs
More employees still fall ill for a long period of time than return to work. Reintegration programs are started too late and looking for another job is not supported enough, a study by the National Bank shows.
Every quarter, more than 25,000 male and 30,000 female employees fall back on their health insurance. On December 31, 2022, the number of long-term sick people in Belgium amounted to more than 187,000 male and almost 285,000 female employees. This concerns people who are incapacitated for work for more than twelve months for medical reasons.
Their numbers have been increasing for twenty years. Both the speed of the increase and the share of workers on sick leave are greater in Belgium than in the rest of Europe. Measures to help people with long-term illness find a job more quickly cannot yet reverse this trend. This is learned from a study by the National Bank.
The reason for the continued increase, the study said, includes the average aging of the working population. At the turn of the century, only one in four workers was over 45 years old, today more than forty percent in the private sector. The feminization of the working population also increases the number of people with long-term illnesses. On average, women are more chronically ill than men. This overrepresentation is partly explained by the unequal division of household tasks between men and women. Research shows a link between absence due to illness and the tension between work and family. But that alone is not sufficient to explain the gender gap among the long-term ill, according to the National Bank.
Sick leave due to physical problems is on average more common in construction, transport or industry. Mental health problems are more frequent in the social, medical and financial sectors. The legislation surrounding the protection of physical safety at work is well developed, but psychosocial safety has only recently been taken seriously. According to the authors, it is difficult to say whether work in general has become harder over the past fifteen years. The fact is that dropouts due to mental health problems are increasing sharply and that demographic evolution alone does not explain the entire increase in the number of long-term ill people.
The longer, the more difficult
It is in the interest of people with long-term illness to get back to work as quickly as possible. After six months of sick leave, the chance of reactivation drops significantly. Figures show that two-thirds of employees on sick leave return to work within six months. Anyone who has been ill for more than a year has barely a twenty percent chance of finding a new job. This is partly due to the severity of the disease. But long-term absence is also self-reinforcing: the longer someone is absent, the more difficult it is to return.
The government and social partners have been aware of the problem for some time and have implemented programs to ease the return to the labor market. However, they do not yet have enough impact to reverse the trend. The most successful is the part-time return to the workplace. Every year, around 120,000 employees on sick leave use it, a doubling since 2015. The salary is adjusted from the health insurance. The success rate is almost 80 percent. Nearly forty thousand people apply for a reintegration programme. The National Bank warns that the wage gap between part-time work with a health insurance allowance and full-time work keeps people in part-time work for longer than necessary.
However, the option to look for a new job through a VDAB job program remains grossly underutilized. Only five thousand employees on sick leave use this every year. Less than thirty percent of them actually find their way back to the labor market.
