The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) announced that unemployment fell to 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2021. According to CBS chief economist Peter Hein van Mulligen, ‘you have to go back almost fifty years’ for a period when there were so few unemployed people and such a crying shortage of skilled workers.
Raise
The scarcity is so great that more and more people are managing to raise their salary. “Starting salaries are higher, people work longer hours and employees receive a salary increase from their boss,” says Piet Rietman, economist at ABN Amro. CBS economist Van Mulligen also sees this trend: “If people get a promotion, that is a much bigger boost for their purchasing power than any collective labor agreement wage increase.”