© BELGA/BELPRESS
Companies will have spent half a billion euros in 2023 to pay a purchasing power premium to their employees on top of the indexed wage. That is more than the 400 million that employers spent on the corona premium a year earlier, with which they reached half of the employees.
Source: BELGA
Tuesday 2 April 2024 at 06:02
De Tijd reports on the research by the business organization Unizo from which the figures appear.
The purchasing power premium – in the form of a consumption voucher, analogous to meal vouchers – was intended as a one-off extra of a maximum of 500 euros in companies that were performing well despite the inflation shock. The condition was that the companies in question had made a ‘high profit’ in 2022. In the case of an ‘exceptionally high profit’, the amount could increase to 750 euros.
The interpretation of these two concepts had to be agreed between trade unions and employers at sector level. According to Unizo, this has gone wrong in one in five sectors. “Achieving a profit of 1 euro was enough to award the premium,” says Danny Van Assche, the managing director of Unizo. According to him, this happened in the petrochemical industry, the glass industry and paper and cardboard companies, among others. In other sectors, such as brickworks, it was sufficient that no cash flowed out of the company to grant the premium.