The curves are maddening and would almost make the best climbers of the Tour de France green with fear if they had to climb passes of such magnitude during the next Grande Boucle: the unemployment figures, in Wallonia as in Brussels, show levels at rising in recent months. The proportion of job seekers still stood, in February 2022, at 12.5% of the active population in Wallonia and 14.9% in Brussels. A year later, this rate increased by 1.3% and 0.4% respectively to settle, at the beginning of March, at 13.8% in Wallonia and 15.3% for the whole of the Brussels region. With insane rates in certain cities such as Farciennes, Liège or Charleroi where one in four working people is today unemployed.
Blame it on the covid crisis, followed by the energy crisis which plunged the finances of thousands of companies into the red, forcing them to cease their activities or to lay off staff to avoid having to declare bankruptcy. As a result, in Wallonia alone, there are now nearly 20,000 additional unemployed compared to February 2022. Minister Morreale, in charge of Employment. Hundreds of millions of euros have been injected into companies to limit social damage. Without this aid, the job losses would undoubtedly have been much greater.”
To curb a rise in unemployment which might be disastrous, reforms have been put in place to, among other things, secure APE jobs, provide job seekers in administrative difficulties with better support from Forem, or even by subsidizing companies that hire and train unskilled people on their own. “But we are coming to the end of the road”, indicates the Morreale firm.
Hear: these initiatives attack the symptoms but do not treat the cause. A bit like a smoker who is treated for lung cancer while continuing to smoke. “The key to fighting unemployment is education, training,” asserts Muriel Dejemeppe, professor of economics at UCLouvain.
Unemployment would indeed be the symptom of a more structural problem which would find, among other things, its origin in the industrial past of Wallonia. “In general, Wallonia has suffered greatly from deindustrialisation, continues Muriel Dejemeppe. Thousands of low-skilled people lost their jobs when coal mines and mining towns closed. These people, who only had a precarious income at the time, did not necessarily know how to offer their children an education that would have led to a diploma that might be valued on the labor market.”
As a result, in some municipalities, there is a particularly high rate of academic delay. Which sometimes affects nearly one in four students in secondary school. “School delay is not transmitted from generation to generation but socio-economic characteristics influence the way in which one rises socially, indicates Muriel Dejemeppe. In a precarious environment, the possibilities of climbing the social ladder are rarer.
With a vicious circle since these children who have become adults now find themselves unemployed or in low-skilled and therefore less well-paid jobs. However, job offers requiring little qualification, which used to be plentiful, have become rare in favor of jobs requiring more qualifying training, particularly at university level.
Custodian of the highest unemployment rate in Wallonia, Farciennes is no exception to the rule, just like most of the municipalities on the Walloon backbone, with a certain industrial past. With a perverse effect: the inhabitants of these towns that are precarious on the job market who manage to find a well-paid job are often inclined to leave these towns to settle in larger dwellings on the outskirts, favoring the figures unemployment in the municipality where they reside at the expense of that where they work. Like Brussels, which provides thousands of jobs, a very large part of which is taken up by Flemish or Brussels workers. “It is also for this reason that city centers are often inhabited by a more precarious population.”
Flanders would be less affected by unemployment (only 6%, twice less than in Wallonia!) in particular because it has not had to suffer from deindustrialisation. And was able to enjoy more quickly than elsewhere a level of education and training allowing pupils and students to be better valued on the labor market, with highly sought-following qualified profiles. “In the end, recalls Muriel Dejemeppe, everything goes through the school to break the negative generational spirals. The key is education.”
