Jasper Pillen: “The fiscally interesting cross-border worker status is a dying system, with this decline as a logical consequence, but the effect acts as an accelerator on the West Flemish labor shortage. In just 5 years we have already lost 4,500 employees in this way.”
The sixty-year-old agreement between France and Belgium on the status of cross-border workers expires in 2033. “Year after year we see a decrease in the numbers. Between 2018 and 2022 we lost more than 4,500 workers,” Pillen learns from the requested figures. “The consequences are particularly noticeable in West Flanders: the province borders France and the labor market is one of the tightest in the entire country, with almost full employment.”