Working More, Longer, and Healthier: Solutions and Pitfalls in The Netherlands

As any other European country, the Netherlands is facing the challenge of an ageing population. This has led to many policy measures that aim at an increase of the working population, especially among women and older persons in order to cushion the consequences of population ageing. These measures include stricter qualifying conditions for sickness benefits and disability pensions, more incentives to work, strong limitations of early retirement, a raising of the pensionable age commensurate to life expectancy, and attempts to facilitate a better balance between work and private life. The aim of this chapter is to review the measures that have been put in place in the Netherlands to increase employment among two vulnerable categories of employees: those who are (fully or partly) incapacitated for work because of illness or limitations (short-term or long-term) and employees in the older age groups. It is shown that some measures have been rather successful indeed. However, several challenges remain, such as the problem of risk selection, the high number of flex workers entering the sickness and invalidity schemes, the increasing differences in social security between employees with permanent contracts and flex workers, the still low average number of working hours, and the (im)balance between work and private life.