Dutch should work longer, says Kok

Dutch people need to work longer hours in order to combat the effect of the ageing population, former prime minister and union boss Wim Kok said in an interview in Saturday’s Volkskrant.


Kok was one of the masterminds behind the 25-year-old Wassenaar agreement, in which the working week was lowered from 40 to 36 hours.
Kok, now a member of the supervisory boards at Shell, ING, TNT, Air France-KLM and Stork, told the paper that early retirement schemes and shorter working weeks were the solutions for labour market problems 25 years ago. ‘But now they appear to be bottlenecks,’ Kok told the paper.

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