Summary
The corona crisis has a serious impact on working people, especially in a number of sectors. This is what emerged from the transitions on the labour market of Statbel, the Belgian statistics office. If we compare the labour market status of the first quarter of 2020 with the labour market status of the first quarter of 2021, 9 out of 10 employed persons (90.8%) are still at work. A high percentage, although it is lower than the previous quarters. Especially people who worked in the ‘horeca’ sector have not yet returned to work in the first quarter of 2021.
For the unemployed we see that people are staying unemployed longer: 44.9% of the unemployed in the first quarter of 2020 are also unemployed in the first quarter of 2021. The regional differences are striking here: in the Flemish region, 38.4% of the unemployed persons are still unemployed after one year. In the Walloon and Brussels-Capital Regions, the figures are 48.6 and 48.7% respectively.
Introduction
2020 will always be the year of the corona crisis. We can also see this in the longitudinal statistics of the Labour Force Survey: more unemployed people have entered the statistics in the past year because the unemployed are less likely to find work and employed persons are slightly more likely to lose their jobs. Statbel publishes today the transitions on the labour market between the first quarter of 2020 (i.e. just before the crisis breaks out) and the first quarter of 2021.
The comparison is complicated by a change in the definition of employed persons in the new European framework regulation: persons who have been temporarily unemployed for more than three months (‘long-term temporarily unemployed’) are now counted among the unemployed or inactive, and no longer among the employed - depending on the answers to the questions on job search and availability. In the first quarter of 2021, it is estimated that 80,000 long-term temporarily unemployed people are counted among the inactive (and to a lesser extent the unemployed). More details on the changes can be found in this note: (Changes to the Labour Force Survey (LFS) in 2021)