In our blog here, we noted EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s focus on the evolution of cartels in recent years, with the emergence of purchasing cartels and the focus in the US on ‘no-poach’ agreements, whereby companies agree not to recruit each other’s workers and/or fix wages. This is similar to a purchasing cartel, except … Continue Reading
Being married to a techie who was once a lawyer, and not without a degree of self-interest I have recently spent a good number of hours musing over the impact of GPT on the future of the legal profession. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer (memorise it, this will soon be a quiz question) and … Continue Reading
The statistics Some uplifting news last week from Statbel, the Belgian Agency for Statistics. In 2021, there was no longer a pay gap for young women in Belgium. But as their age goes up, so opens up the pay gap with male colleagues. On average across all ages, women in Belgium earned 5% less per … Continue Reading
In the first part of our mini blog series we discussed the training plan you are required to introduce for your employees in Belgium before 31 March. In this second blog, we will zoom in on the biking allowance which was introduced recently. Although we are not quite at the level of the Dutch (the … Continue Reading
As it turns out, lots. Too much for one blog, in fact, so welcome to a short miniseries on the new developments of most relevance to you as employer. In recent months, the Belgian legislature has clearly come out of its post pandemic slump and a number of new measures have been introduced, some of … Continue Reading
Roughly a year late, but here we are then: Belgium has finally transposed the Whistleblowers Directive into national law. The Act of 28 November 2022 on the protection of reporters of breaches of Union or national law discovered within a legal entity in the private sector sets out the rules for companies in the private … Continue Reading
Over the last few weeks you may have been bombarded with fliers and alerts on the many recent changes to Belgian employment laws. A lot of changes indeed, but what do they mean for you, and what do you need to do? In this post, we have cut away all the details to come to … Continue Reading
If I were to rank the employment law questions I receive by popularity, questions around long-term absence, absenteeism and generally how to deal with work incapacity would be right up there, a definite podium finish. The tension between the legitimate frustrations of employers and the no-fault nature of the employees’ absence seems eternal. To give … Continue Reading
The human suffering in Ukraine is immense and leaves all of us aghast. Prosaic as it may sound by comparison, however, the economic effect of the Russia/Ukraine conflict is also trickling down into Belgium and the rest of the world, as prices for utilities and food are on the rise almost everywhere. Soon enough, Belgian … Continue Reading
After the federal majority parties failed to conclude an agreement on Friday on a series of labour market reforms, they finally broke the deadlock overnight on Monday this week. In an early fail on the work:life balance front, the new measures were unveiled at a presumably sparsely-attended press conference at 2.30am. Bleary-eyed Ministers praised the … Continue Reading
When an employee leaves, it is often a first step for the business that his personal access to their professional mailbox is cancelled as soon as possible (often even during the exit meeting). But most often that mailbox will remain open for quite some time after the termination, as there is a genuine business concern … Continue Reading
On 9 December, the European Commission published draft Guidelines on the application of EU competition law to collective agreements on the working conditions of solo self-employed people providing services. The draft Guidelines are the product of an initial impact assessment published this time last year and a subsequent consultation with stakeholders from March to May. … Continue Reading
Against the background of industrial unrest in other sectors, the social partners of Joint Committee 200 –the Committee representing the largest number of employees in the country, more than 480.000 in total – have quietly come to an agreement on employment and working conditions. The most important provisions of the agreement are summarized within this … Continue Reading
In the wave of sunny optimism following the roll-out of our vaccination programme this spring-summer, few people in Belgium had anticipated that the Covid situation would worsen again, or do so as quickly as it has. And yet the numbers of infections and patients in intensive care are now at an all-time high. New stricter … Continue Reading
On 19 October, Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President and Commissioner for Competition of the European Commission, delivered a speech addressing the EU’s current policy when addressing cartels, potential changes to the Commission’s leniency program and recent dawn-raid efforts. Most notably, Vestager spoke about so-called ‘no-poach’ agreements, whereby companies agree not to recruit each other’s workers and/or … Continue Reading
In this fifth and final episode of our Working from Home series, we will dive into the less explored topic of working time for teleworkers. When it comes to working time, teleworkers are a bit of a special breed. Teleworkers are excluded from the majority of the provisions of the Labour Act, in particular the … Continue Reading
The pandemic has given an enormous boost to working from home, in particular (to state the obvious) when it was mandatory. Where roles permitted it, even those employers and employees most vigorously opposed to it simply had no choice but to accept it. When quizzed about the reasons why they oppose WFH, most employers’ main … Continue Reading
I will start this third part of our Working from Home series with a confession: I worked the first couple of weeks of lockdown from a small table dragged in from our balcony. Not because I don’t have a fully equipped and ergonomically approved home office, because I do. I just didn’t like the vibe … Continue Reading
In this second part of our “Working from home” series, we look at the element that has so far attracted by far the most questions, which is around who pays the costs of working from home. It should come as no surprise that this topic has generated so many queries. Belgium has introduced a number … Continue Reading
At the risk of kicking in an open door, working from home and the return to the office has become this summer’s hot topic. In Belgium the pandemic has meant that working from home where you could was mandatory until the end of June. Employees are now gradually returning to the workplace but surveys show … Continue Reading
As we saw the covid graphs get steeper each day of last week, it is no real surprise that the Belgian government has now announced a new “Easter lockdown” for the next four weeks. Schools will close as of this Friday for an extended Easter break, that increasingly imperative haircut will have to wait another … Continue Reading
In order to ensure that as many people as possible are vaccinated, the trade unions and the employers’ organisations in the National Labour Council have agreed that employees will be allowed to take the necessary time off to be vaccinated. If enough vaccines are available, at-risk patients will be vaccinated from April onwards and the … Continue Reading
We already had a legal framework for recurrent home working and a separate one for “occasional” home working, but up until now there was no clear guidance on the mandatory home working imposed by the Belgian government as a measure to combat the pandemic. Clarity at last, however, as the National Labour Council voted through … Continue Reading
In a previous blog we noted that as of November 2020, Belgium would again be in semi-lockdown and that one of the measures re-imposed was the obligation to work from home, unless this is realistically impossible. Employees whose work requires them to go the office need a confirmatory certificate from their employer attesting to this … Continue Reading
