On the construction site in Heikant, the jokes are in Flemish

It’s raining on the construction site in the Zeeuws-Vlaanderen village of Sint Jansteen. The men who are working there, two Dutch and three Flemings, just keep working. This is not self-evident for the Flemish people. If rain gets in the way of the work, that can be a reason to ‘cap’: stay at home and get paid for 70 percent. This system is only known in Belgium. “We just put on a raincoat,” says their Dutch project leader Ricardo van Dorsselaer. He gives his Flemish colleagues a wink.

The three Belgian men are just taking a break, in a van full of building materials. They are employed by a Belgian company that also supplies personnel to Dutch projects. What is now a pile of sand with cranes, piles of bricks and newly erected facades, will soon be a new neighborhood with large detached houses. The Belgians, Gerrit Maes (39), Mauro Van Puyvelde (20) and Kristian Gerkay (31), install the window frames. They work together with Dutch bricklayers and under Dutch management. That often leads to teasing back and forth.

As elsewhere in the Netherlands, in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, already a region with a very tight labor market, it is difficult to find personnel for construction. The solution lies just across the border: it has become more difficult for Flemish construction workers to find construction projects in their own country.

ING economists predicted this year that the growth in the Belgian construction industry could come to an end. In the first ten months of 2022, the number of permits granted for residential construction fell by 8.3 percent. Rising material prices and higher interest rates depressed applications, and the waiting time for permits that are applied for is usually long, ING economist Wouter Thierie told the Belgian newspaper The newspapaer. This discourages project developers and slows down the construction sector.

That is why Flemish builders regularly turn to Martin Mannaert, owner of the Dutch construction company MM Nieuwbouw en Verbouwing. Of the at least forty people that the company deploys on a daily basis on construction projects in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, more than two-thirds are Belgian.

No 9 to 5 mentality

It is shortly before the construction holiday when Ricardo van Dorsselaer, project leader at MM, drives the reporters past construction sites in Sint Jansteen and Heikant, Dutch villages on the border. On the way, he stops on a long road, and points to a house. “We recently did a roof renovation there. One side of this road is in the Netherlands, the other side of the road in Belgium.” Just look, he says: a few meters from the house there is a boundary marker. It is located on Belgian soil, but receives power from the Netherlands. No problem, says Van Dorsselaer. “Don’t give anyone a hard time about it.”

The three Belgians on the construction site in Sint Jansteen have been working for MM for three to five years, they say. They live in villages across the border, about a ten to twenty minute drive away. In the bus in which they take a break, they eat bastogne cakes. “One too?”

Martin Mannaert himself only employs bricklayers and is happy with the many independent Belgian builders who knock on his door, he later tells on the phone. He needs roofers and frame fitters to finish his homes. And they are also better than Dutch builders, he thinks. “They do better work and work harder than the Dutch.”

The fact that Belgians have a better attitude to work is recognized all too well by the Dutch Michel Picavet (35). For years he worked as a bricklayer in Belgium. “There, everyone runs for the boss when he is on site,” he says in the construction shed on Sint Jansteen, where he eats a meal salad together with his Dutch colleague Stefano Kuipers. They have just lifted a pallet of bricks onto the floor of a house under construction. “In the Netherlands we have a 9-to-5 mentality and we think of our back when we have to lift heavy. In Belgium they laugh about that.”

Unlike Dutch contractors, Belgian contractors often specialize in one activity, such as plastering, installing or bricklaying. According to Mannaert, that also means that they are often better in that specific part. “Dutch contractors do not work in such a fragmented way,” he says. “They often offer everything in one. Belgian contractors have to win more contracts to fill the agenda, because their work is of shorter duration.” That is why they also look for assignments across the border.

Things were different in Picavet’s time in Belgium. About ten years ago, during the construction crisis, he was in danger of losing his job with a Dutch contractor. “Here across the border was a contractor who had a lot of work,” he says. “More was built there than in the Netherlands. I was able to get started right away.”

Fight harder

Meanwhile, small Belgian contractors, such as freelancer Kevin Bracke (36), have to fight harder to get work. “A few years ago I got a ‘yes’ to eight of the ten quotes I sent,” he says at the construction site in Heikant, where he is assembling the roof of a new house. “Nowadays I am happy if I win two out of ten assignments.”

In the past, a pot of beer was sometimes ready for us in Belgium, now you sometimes don’t even get a cup of coffee

Kevin Bracke contractor

This has everything to do with the sky-high inflation, think Bracke and his Flemish colleague Damian Geers (23). Prices have risen sharply in the past year and a half in both the Netherlands and Belgium. lived in the Flemish Region of Belgium 7.7 percent of the population in 2022 with an income below the poverty line. In the Netherlands this is with 6.8 percent slightly lower. Although these percentages are not far apart, Bracke and Geers think that the rising prices are more clearly felt in Belgium. “There, the question of who can still afford it is much more alive than in the Netherlands,” says Geers.

They notice it, for example, when they visit customers. When they renovate a house in Belgium, they rarely get something to drink or eat, they say. “In the past, there was sometimes a pot of beer ready for us in Belgium,” says Bracke. “Nowadays you sometimes don’t even get a cup of coffee, while the Dutch are ready with butter cake.”

Now that it is more difficult to get commissions in Belgium, the Flemish people are more than happy to accept Mannaert’s work in the Netherlands. But also for MM an uncertain period seems to be ahead. “There are many projects in the works, as we call them,” says Van Dorsselaer, “but the question is whether they will also be realized.” Construction plans throughout the Netherlands have recently been delayed due to uncertainty about nitrogen measures.

Mannaert also hears from colleagues who take on larger projects, such as the construction of flats, that sales of new-build homes are also declining in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, just like in the rest of the Netherlands. And in the municipality of Hulst, where MM mainly builds, he notices that fewer and fewer new building plots are being issued.

In the meantime, Belgian contractors are also looking across the border more often to start new construction projects in the Netherlands, due to a lack of projects in their own country. Dutch clients also regularly request quotations from them.

Sometimes Van Dorsselaer drives past a new house, he says, which was built in roughly the same style as the houses of MM – modern, sleek and black – but by a Flemish company. “We might as well have built it, I sometimes think.”

Van Dorsselaer is the only Dutchman at the construction site in Heikant. His Zeeland accent makes way for a soft g and his statements become unintelligible to the reporters. Judging by the laughter of the Flemish colleagues, they must be good jokes. “Salut hey!” he shouts to them as he drives his bus away from the construction site. “When you see each other that often,” he says, “you naturally start joking with each other in the same language.”