‘Don’t enter a full-time bonus, but a meaning bonus’ | Work

An extra if you start working full-time? Our government is currently investigating to what extent this is a good solution for the shortage on the labor market. Such a ‘full-time bonus’ would give people who now work part-time an incentive to work more hours.

Quite apart from the question of whether such a bonus works to solve the problem, such a bonus seems to me to be exactly the wrong signal. Yes, we have more ‘part-time princesses’ (m/f) in the Netherlands than in other countries. For a large part of the population, life is not just about work. In doing so, they afford ‘luxuries’, such as spending time with the children, self-development, voluntary work and informal care. Or simply: time for yourself, because you work to live, instead of the other way around. Even if that is economically ‘undesirable’.

Sounds nice then, such a full-time bonus to make people work more hours. But if in practice it turns out that you become dependent on such a bonus to pay your fixed costs, it is no longer an extra, but an obligation. Moreover, I fear that after some time we will see some of these ‘bonus customers’ again in mental health care because they have worked themselves out and are in a burnout. In fact, there has been a full-time bonus for a long time to make more work attractive. We call this ‘full-time salary’.

I wrote before that the staff shortage is mainly a valuation deficit. The problem: The biggest shortage occurs in the least valued (and least paid) jobs. The most important work (nurse, teacher) is treated with little respect. Bullshit jobs behind a computer are heavily overpaid.

So let me make a suggestion other than a bonus to get you going. I see much more in a meaning bonus, which rewards work that really matters. After all, there is still a lot of labor potential that is now ‘stuck’ in nonsensical jobs.

Give all crypto experts, corporate lobbyists, scrum masters, and SEO experts a big sum of money to retrain. We can use them much better where the biggest blows are currently taking place: at the bedside, in front of the class, supervising on the street or behind the wheel of the bus. Pay the latter groups at least as much as a marketing manager at a start-up. And who knows, maybe the work will even lead to more job satisfaction. Even if that is part time, because there is more to life than work.

Thijs Launspach is a psychologist and stress expert. He is the author of, among others, You are already enough – Mentally healthy in a disturbed world (2022), Werk can also uit (2020) and Fokking Druk (2018).

Watch all our work and career videos here: