Headlines Employment & Labour
The new Programme Act has been published in the Belgian State Gazette of 31 December 2012. This new Act contains a number of labour and social security law novelties, which we will briefly sum up hereafter. In the next few weeks, we will discuss part of these topics more in detail. The first topic we will address is the tightened legal framework on the hiring out of personnel.
The new Programme Act contains measures combating social fraud, such as:
- tightened rules on the hiring out of personnel;
- an anti-abuse provision applicable to those who do not correctly apply the rules of conflict of social security laws in case of international employment (e.g. posting of workers, or situations where people work/live in different countries) in order to evade Belgian social security;
- a general anti-abuse provision applicable to those who put themselves outside or just inside the scope of application of labour and social security law, "in violation of the objectives of one or more provisions of labour and social security law".
Further, the new Programme Act also contains:
- measures which must encourage employers calling upon temporary unemployment to offer a training to the temporary unemployed employees;
- various provisions on supplementary pensions, for employees and self-employed persons;
- the introduction of a special employer's contribution of 33% and an employee's contribution of 13,07% levied on non-recurring result-linked bonuses and an increase of the annual threshold to 3.100 EUR.
