Living costs in Belgium rose almost twice as fast as wages last year, as government-mandated wage indexations failed to keep pace with soaring costs for energy and household goods.
According to a report published on Thursday by Eurostat, the EU's official statistics agency, Belgium registered a headline inflation rate of 10.2% in 2022, with average hourly wages growing by a mere 6.2% over the same period.
Housing and utilities experienced the steepest price increases, growing by almost a third (32.3%). Transport and food costs rose by 11.8% and 9%, respectively.
The study also found that Belgium's inflation rate was greater than the EU's average of 9.2%. More promisingly, however, it noted that the country's hourly wage growth was higher than the bloc's average of 4.4% — implying that, although living standards fell in Belgium last year, they fell less than they did across the EU as a whole.
Just two EU countries registered wage rises greater than the headline inflation rate, namely Bulgaria (15.5% average wage rise compared to a 13% inflation rate) and Romania (12.3% to 12%).
'Struggling to put food on the table'
The report's findings were quickly condemned by union leaders, with European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) General Secretary Esther Lynch suggesting that they provided "further proof that workers are the victims of inflation and not its cause."
"Behind these figures are real people who have been struggling to put food on the table, heat their homes and even afford transport to their own workplace," she said.
Lynch also claimed that the principal reason for the disparity between wage growth and inflation was that "companies, particularly those in the energy and food sectors, [are] taking advantage of supply issues to ramp up their prices and make record profits."
"It's time politicians stopped punishing the victims of inflation by holding down wages and tackled the real cause of inflation through windfall taxes on excess profits," she noted.
Belgium introduced such a windfall tax — also dubbed a solidarity contribution — which reportedly yielded almost €435 million to the Belgian treasury this spring, money that will be used to fund the measures the country has taken to help ease people's energy bills.
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Lynch's comments echoed previous remarks made last month when she condemned the European Central Bank's (ECB) decision to temper inflation by raising its core interest rate for the sixth time in the past nine months.
"After being hammered by a cost-of-living crisis caused by profit-driven inflation, the last thing that working people need is another recession that the ECB risks creating through [another] rate hike," she said at the time, adding that "the ECB's own evidence says inflation has been driven by supply-chain bottlenecks and excess profits."
