Monthly figures on the labour market – June 2021

DataLab
Monthly figures on the labour market – June 2021

The provisional results for the monthly indicators based on the Labour Force Survey of Statbel, the Belgian statistical office, show positive evolutions on the labour market in June. The employment rate is increasing and amounts to 71.0% among people aged 20-64, while the unemployment rate is going down to 5.9% among people aged 15-64.

The employment rate is at its highest level since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic

Based on provisional results from the Labour Force Survey, the employment rate of people aged 20-64 is estimated in June at 71.0%, which is the highest figure since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The increase is most striking in Flanders, with an evolution from 73.2% to 76.3% in the month of June. Brussels also registers an increase in the employment rate from 60.3% to 61.0%. For Wallonia, on the other hand, we already saw a fairly large increase in May, which means that the figure is now falling back slightly and is estimated at 65.0% in June.

At the beginning of 2021, a new European framework regulation came into force. This led to adjustments to the survey. Therefore, the employment rate of 2021 cannot simply be compared with the figures before 2021. One of the important changes: from this year on, people who are temporarily unemployed for more than three months are no longer counted among the employed, but among the unemployed or inactive, depending on the answers to the questions on job search and availability. In order to illustrate the impact of this changed treatment of the long-term temporarily unemployed, we calculate, in addition to the official employment rate, an alternative employment rate, whereby the long-term temporarily unemployed are, as before, classified as employed persons.

Since May 2021, we have seen the number of long-term temporarily unemployed begin to fall sharply, which has also narrowed the gap between the official and alternative employment rates. However, if all long-term temporarily unemployed people were counted as employed, the employment rate of 20-64 year-olds would be half a percentage point higher and would be estimated at 71.5% in June.

Decrease in unemployment rate

The unemployment rate of people aged 15-64 registers in June 2021 a nice decrease compared to the month before and is estimated at 5.9%, which means that the figure seems to be moving back towards the low levels of before the Covid-19 pandemic. We see a clear decrease in Flanders (from 4.5% to 3.6%) and Wallonia (from 9.7% to 8.5%), while we observe an increase in Brussels in June (from 11.3% to 12.2%), after a sharp decrease in May.

The changed treatment of the temporarily unemployed from 2021 onwards has hardly any impact now on the calculation of the unemployment rate. The so-called alternative unemployment rate differs barely from the official unemployment rate. This, too, is logically connected to the sharp decrease in the number of long-term temporarily unemployed.

Homeworking remains very common in June with 41.5% of the employed who sometimes or usually work from home

In the month of June, the teleworking obligation was relaxed by the government in the form of allowing some returns to the office. The June figures do not yet show any clear impact of this relaxation. Some 41.5% of the working population still sometimes or usually work from home.

Sharp decrease of employed people absent from work due to temporary unemployment

In the figures on working hours and absences from work, we mainly saw the impact of holidays and public holidays in April and May. In the month of June, the average number of hours worked per week again approached the normal level with an average of 32.9 hours per week.

The number of people employed absent due to temporary unemployment, either for the entire reference week or for part of it, continues to decline. Only some 7,000 people were in temporary unemployment during the entire reference week and 41,000 persons for part of the reference week. Note that this is a different group from the long-term temporarily unemployed people mentioned at the beginning of this report. When the total uninterrupted duration of temporary unemployment amounts to a maximum of 3 months, the temporarily unemployed are, as before, still counted as employed.