The new chair of Belgium’s Union of Walloon Enterprises (UWE) has ambitious plans for the future of the organisation. Jean-François Heris, President of AGC Glass Europe, used his investiture on 2 October 2012 to describe the changes he wanted to see in UWE over the coming decade. He said he would work on four main areas – talent management, supporting the growth of companies, developing simple and efficient public tools, and promoting constructive social dialogue.
Background
Belgium’s Union of Walloon Enterprises (UWE), one of the country’s leading employer organisations, has installed a new Chair. He is Jean-François Heris, President of AGC Glass Europe. At his investiture at the UWE annual meeting on 2 October 2012, he set out ambitious plans that he hopes will drive the organisation and the Wallonia region of Belgium through the current economic crisis.
Job creation and training
New Chair Heris said the 10,000 jobs being created each year in Wallonia are not enough for the regional economy, and he wanted enough investment in teaching and training to triple regional job creation to at least 30,000 jobs a year. He said this could reduce the current number of 240,000 unemployed and respond to the country’s skill shortages. Heris highlighted a shortage of mechanical engineers, store managers, assembly-line workers, receptionists and sales managers.
He said money for training funnelled through a ‘Talents’ management plan could bring the added value of attracting foreign companies and investment. The plan would require some structural changes and investment at the teaching level. The new Chair considered that excellent skills and knowledge results should be expected from the initiative, since Belgium has had one of the highest education budgets in Europe in recent decades according to statistics from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD. Heris also proposed an analysis of the Flemish and the Finnish models as a way of providing interesting ways to develop the education and training system in the future.
Supporting company growth
According to Heris, there are insufficient measures in place to support company growth. He said there needed to be improved initiatives for entrepreneurs’ coaching, the promotion of innovation, and increasing connections between research bodies and companies to reinforce the link between theory and practice.
He highlighted a number of problems faced by Walloon companies, including trouble finding skilled workers, difficulties accessing finance, and taxation being a heavy burden for companies, especially for the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). He also underlined the ‘wage handicap’ in Belgium. He said: ‘By comparison with the Eurozone average, the cost of labour per hour is higher by €12.’
He called for more structural reforms to improve the competitiveness and the profitability of Walloon companies.
Simple and efficient public tools
Heris proposed an in-depth look at simplifying financial and tax legislations, and a reduction in the number of structures which, as he put it, ‘could discourage more than one investor’. He pointed out that in Wallonia there were 25 structures to support companies’ growth and 250 different kinds of financial aid. He said there were also 16 different types of regional taxes, 15 provincial taxes and 46 different local taxes.
Promoting a constructive social dialogue
Heris said he was surprised by the large number of companies which had fewer than 50 employees. Belgian law stipulates that a health and safety committee has to be created and a trade union delegation established in companies with at least 50 employees. According to Heris, these obligations confirm the suspicion that many entrepreneurs harbour about unions, emphasised by the large number of strikes which were disrupting the smooth running of commerce. He said in 95% of companies, relations between management and employees were good. However, the conflicts that occurred in the remaining 5% of businesses had a significant and negative impact on the reputation of firms in the Walloon area.
Heris issued a call to employers’ associations and trade unions in Wallonia to focus on a shared goal to ‘promote the development of the company and thus promote the well-being of Walloons’.
Commentary
Current discussions about the transfer of competencies between the federal and the regional levels, and the result of cross-sector bargaining that is due to take place shortly could have an impact on Wallonia’s Ambition 2020 plan. There was no reaction from the unions to the new UWE chair’s comments – they were busy preparing the new cross-sectoral agreement for 2013–2014. It is possible the unions are waiting for the implementation of this plan.
Michel Ajzen, Institut des Sciences du Travail, UCL