On Thursday, the plenary room gave the green light to Minister Frank Vandenbroucke’s (Vooruit) “return to work plan”. This includes making long-term sufferers more responsible.
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The text normally received House approval before the summer recess, but was ultimately not voted on. The bill creates a mechanism to financially sanction both long-term sick employees and their employers from next year, albeit after a whole cascade of warnings.
Long-term patients can lose 2.5 percent of their benefits if they continue to refuse to assist in their reintegration into the workplace after a long insistence. Companies where at least three employees have been out of work for at least twelve months in the past four quarters and where the number of long-term patients is three times the private sector average and twice the average for their own sector, pay a quarterly contribution of 0.635 per cent on salary, which is equivalent to 2.5 per cent on an annual basis.
The criticism of the design comes from the midfield. According to the Christian union ACV and the Christian health insurance fund CM, these are ineffective measures, further pushing the sick into misery and diverting attention from the root cause of half a million long-term patients: not facing sick work.
“Threatening a loss of income does not work, but it undermines the necessary confidence in the counseling process and pushes people in an already very precarious situation further into misery,” they say in a joint statement. ‘Only a positive and comprehensive approach works, with an effective reintegration policy at the individual and collective level.’
ACV and CM find it all the more incomprehensible that financial sanctions are being imposed in a context where many people are already struggling to make ends meet.
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