The Belgian government wants to implement even more measures to encourage night work in e-commerce. This is the only way for distribution centres to stay open at night and for Belgium to compete with neighbouring countries such as the Netherlands and Germany.
Kris Peeters, minister of work, wants to offer additional pay cuts for employees who work at night. Money should be used from corporate tax reform for specific sectors and supermarkets should experiment with preparing online orders overnight. The minister submitted these plans to sector federation Comeos.
At the end of last year, Belgium lifted the ban on night work after it emerged that online retailers and consumers were flocking to the Netherlands and other neighbouring countries because they were facing all sorts of obstacles in Belgium. Because orders were not allowed to be prepared at night, delivery took on average two days longer than in the Netherlands. Furthermore, labour costs in Belgium are on average twenty per cent higher than in the Netherlands. Yet night work is failing to take off in the country. This is because each company would have to negotiate individually with the trade unions. “This leads to lengthy negotiation periods. The culture in our country is completely different from that in the Netherlands, for example. There, it is quite normal to have to work until 11 pm. Why does it always have to be approved by the trade union secretary here?”, Dominique Michel of Comeos told De Redactie.be at the time.
Editorial LogistiekProfs
