2023-05-14 10:57:00
This is the spring trend: all the center and right-wing parties now want to limit unemployment over time. Only ecologists, socialists and communists refuse. But isn’t this measure to the disadvantage of Wallonia and Brussels?
“Limiting unemployment, we have to do it. But the question is ‘How do we support people towards a new job?’. If the transition lasts 6 months to a year, we have to change the support. We must not not punish people, you have to know how to accompany them. You have to punish them if there are abuses”, believes Christian Leysen, federal deputy (Open VLD). “We need another system which is made by the CPAS with the social integration income. This is not a debate between the north and the south, nor between the political parties, because the Flemish socialist party also advocates for a change of our system. If following 6 months, a year, we move to another system and we are accompanied by other people in an integration system with training, or community work. I think it is something good. Above all, we are advocating for a difference between the income of those who work and those who do not work.” Christian Leysen adds that the CPAS play an important role in terms of support.
Compared to Flanders, unemployment is almost three times higher in Wallonia, and almost four times higher in Brussels. The Walloon and Brussels CPAS will above all have to manage these unemployed people. How are they going to do it? “It is clear that if this provision were to see the light of day, it would be a disaster for the 262 CPAS in Wallonia and the 19 in Brussels. Since 2010, we have seen an increase in the number of recipients of social integration income. In ten years, we have a doubling of the granting of these revenues”underlines Laetitia Liénard, the president of the CPAS of Tournai. “If this number has increased, or even doubled, the social workers in the field have not seen their number increase. This makes things more complicated. Especially since the people who knock on the door of the CPAS have not one problem but dozens of problems.”
According to her, the staff of the CPAS is suffering. “These are front-line social workers who are supposed to provide support and their arms are cut off. They feel helpless because they are reduced to being calculators. We receive users and we no longer have time to do the accompaniment that requires energy. We are reduced to asking ‘what are your sources, what are your charges, ok you are entitled to as much, goodbye and thank you. This is not accompaniment’.”
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