Employees should be paid for taking leave to care not only for family members but also friends or neighbours, according to the opposition GroenLinks party, reports Wednesday’s Volkskrant.

GroenLinks is to introduce draft legislation to make this possible, the paper says.
At present workers can take long-term unpaid leave to care for relatives with fatal diseases and 8,000 people made use of this right last year, says the Volkskrant. But in reality some 1.5 million people combined work with caring for their sick partners or parents in 2007 and this led to considerable stress and absenteeism, reports the paper.
Under the new proposal, care leave would be extended to six weeks a year and workers would be entitled to 50% of the minimum wage or around €700 a month.