A new survey by the human resources firm Acerta has revealed that the number of hours worked in Belgian companies for the first six months of the year is reaching pre-pandemic levels.
The figures released by Acerta on Tuesday show that Belgians completed 78.8% of their working hours in the first half of 2022, 2% fewer than the pre-pandemic figures in 2019 (80.6%).
While it is expected that Belgians do not complete all of their working hours due to workers taking days off, going on holiday, or taking a career break, the number of working hours did drop dramatically because of the pandemic, going down to 68.7% during the first half of 2020.
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This was mostly owing to the unusually high temporary unemployment rate of 15.4% that year, which has since dropped to 2.5%. However, this percentage remains larger than in 2019 (when it stood at 0.8%), with Amandine Boseret, a legal expert at Acerta, attributing this to the prolonged energy crisis.
Nonetheless, the Belgian worker takes nearly as many holidays as before the pandemic (7.8% of working hours this year compared to 8.4% in 2019), but is more often off ill (6.6% in 2022 compared to 5.6% in 2019).
Furthermore, Acerta stated that working hours in small and medium-sized enterprises have reduced far more than in large companies in recent years.
