It is not uncommon to fall ill just as your break from work finally arrives: with the job pressure lifted at last so-called "leisure sickness" often kicks in. But from 1 January 2024, these lost holidays can be compensated.
Until now, Belgian employees who became ill while on leave have had to accept their misfortune with nothing in return. However, Europe has been asking Belgium to find a way around this since 2016 and at the start of 2023, Economy and Employment Minister Pierre-Yves Dermagne said he was working on a law to "rectify this unjust situation".
In consultation with the social partners, a solution has now been finalised that from 1 January 2024 will compensate people who become ill or have an accident while taking days off.
How does it work?
If an employee took holidays from a Monday to a Friday but fell ill on Wednesday, they until now would not have been able to swap these missed days, even if they were bedridden until the final day. The new system means that in this scenario the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday will no longer count as days off but rather as sick days.
The new rule will allow all employees (blue and white collar workers) to turn these days off into sick days by submitting a sick note to their employer. The employee will then retain the right to guaranteed pay during those sick days, and the sick days will revert to the holiday counter.
"If your holidays cannot be taken during your holiday year due to an illness, those days can be carried over to the following year," Dermagne's spokesperson Laurent Teerlinck told The Brussels Times earlier this year.
The employer does still have to give permission for the holiday to be automatically extended once a person has recovered.
Following an EU request
The decision follows a request from the EU, which has repeatedly called on Belgium to bring its rules regarding annual and sick leave in line with European directives.
These directives are based on a decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which ruled in 2012 that a worker who becomes unfit for work during his or her paid annual leave should be entitled to a period of leave of the same duration as that of their sick leave at a later point in time, following a court case in Spain.
Proponents of the system explain that employees have a right to paid annual leave "in order to rest and enjoy a period of relaxation and leisure". By contrast, sick leave is to "enable the worker to recover from an illness."
