Dutch worked more last year; 17,000 more jobs

Last year, people in the Netherlands started working more hours on balance. The group of people who started working more hours was slightly larger than the group who started working less. As a result, the total number of hours worked rose by the equivalent of 17,000 full-time jobs, according to Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Unemployed people who started a job made by far the largest contribution.

The labor market in the Netherlands is still very tight and due to the aging of the population, employers fear more and more scarcity in the labor market. As a result, there is a lot of attention on ways to get part-time workers to work more hours. Against this background, CBS conducted research for the first time into the extent to which part-time workers who wanted to work more actually worked longer weeks.

Last year, the Netherlands had 528,000 part-timers who wanted to work more. Almost half of that group consisted of pupils or students with a flexible side job. They usually worked as on-call workers (54 percent), and 27 percent had a contract with fixed hours. Among underemployed part-timers who were not in education, 14 percent were on-call workers and 59 percent had a contract with fixed hours, according to CBS.

Of these so-called underemployed part-timers, an average of 150,000 started working more a quarter later, or 29 percent. That resulted in the equivalent of 20,000 extra full-time jobs.

Many workers who had not necessarily indicated that they wanted to work more, also started doing so. In total, 802,000 people started working more hours, and 346,000 started a job. But on the other hand, 313,000 people stopped working and 773,000 people started working less.

New figures from CBS also show that the working population in the Netherlands increasingly consists of people aged 55 and over. In 2023, 27 percent of all employees were between 55 and 75 years old. Ten years earlier, the figure was 20 percent. Limburg has the highest proportion of workers aged 55 and over.

The CBS emphasizes that the contribution of workers who started working more was limited compared to that of the formerly unemployed. The number of full-time jobs that were added thanks to the latter group was four times as large as the number of jobs of workers who worked more hours than before.