According to the latest edition of the Brussels Poverty and Inequality Report that was published by the Brussels regional care agency Vivalis, a significant proportion of working people in the Brussels-Capital Region live in poverty. The report says that “Employment and being economically active are not necessarily automatically a lever out off poverty”.’
Almost one in ten (9.6%) working Brussels residents that are in employment are living below the poverty line.
This is almost double the national average. The figures for the Brussels-Capital region are much higher than the national average (4.7%) and the figures for Flanders (3.7%) and Wallonia (5%).
Three groups
Vivalis has split the capital’s working poor into three groups. The first is the “visible poor” that work under a succession of short-term employment contracts. The second group is the “hybrid poor” that combine several part-time jobs in order to make ends meet and the invisible poor who work full-time in the black economy.
The working poor’s lot in Brussels is made even worse by high rents, poor housing, debt and other factors that make it harder for them to pull themselves out of poverty than those in the same situation elsewhere in Belgium.
Vivalis says that it wishes to collect more data to gain a better understanding of the “invisible” working poor. At the same time, it intends to focus on lowering barriers to make the labour market simpler. According to Vivalis, a significant proportion of benefit recipients are in work but still need financial support from the benefits system.