Workers benefitting less from business earnings

Last year, workers again received a smaller share of the business community’s earnings. Of every euro that companies earned, employees and self-employed people kept 69 cents. That is slightly lower than in the previous year and much less than in 1995, when workers got 81.4 cents per euro earned.

Statistics Netherlands (CBS), which published these figures, reports that this labor-income ratio has been declining for decades. In some years, there was an incidental increase, but a downward trend is clearly visible.

Last year, the decline came because company profits rose faster than labor income. Workers received a smaller share in the industry, energy sector, and construction, among others. Energy companies, in particular, saw profits rise much more than labor costs.

In some sectors, workers got a larger share of business earnings than the year before. That was the case in agriculture, for example, CBS said.