Newsflash
Social elections

Yesterday, the National Labour Council published its advice concerning a few propositions of the Federal Public Service Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue to amend the legislation concerning the social elections of 2020.

This contains two points which have an immediate impact: the dates of the election period and the advancement of the reference period for the calculation of the employment threshold of your employees and your temporary agency workers.

Date election period

The NLC proposes that the social elections would take place between Monday 11 and Sunday 24 May 2020. Although these dates need to be formally confirmed in the law, you can already check which date would be most suitable for your company. In function of the election day (day Y), all other dates of the election calendar will be determined.

Advanced reference period employment threshold

In the previous editions of the elections, the calendar year preceding the social elections was always the reference period. This reference period is crucial for the calculation of the employment threshold to determine whether or not a company should organize social elections: as of 50 employees for the prevention committee, as of 100 employees for the works council. For the elections of 2020, the reference period would be the year 2019.

In order to avoid that an employer who “flirts” with the threshold starts the election procedure at the beginning of December 2019, while at the end of December he finally concludes that he does not reach the threshold or vice versa, the Federal Public Service Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue has proposed to bring forward the reference period by one quarter. The NLC agrees with this. In concrete terms, this means that the reference period would run from 1 October 2018 until 30 September 2019.

For the calculation of the number of temporary agency workers, it is proposed to bring forward the reference period as well. You should take into account the second quarter of 2019 (except for temporary agency workers who temporarily replace a permanent employee whose employment contract has been suspended). 

> Action point

You should already take into account the proposal to bring forward the reference period for the calculation of the number of employees and temporary agency workers.