Hundreds of thousands of people claiming welfare benefits are ‘lazy wastrels’ who could and should be put to work immediately, employers’ chief Hans de Boer says in an interview with the Volkskrant on Wednesday.

They should ‘roll their sleeves up and get stuck in’, De Boer said in the interview to mark his first year as head of the VNO-NCW.

A large part of the 500,000 welfare (bijstand) claimants are quite capable of working, including those who have college and university degrees, he said. ‘They can pick asparagus in the sunshine with the radio on,’ De Boer told the paper. ‘What is the matter with that?’

In order to stimulate more people to work, welfare benefits should be cut, De Boer said.

De Boer also slammed the government’s plans to increase value-added tax (btw). ‘I told a Labour minister “How stupid can you be?”’ De Boer said. ‘Soon everyone will be complaining about tax increases.’

In a reaction, Labour’s social affairs minister Lodewijk Asscher said De Boer had ‘sworn at the jobless and been proud of it’.

‘These times call for a helping hand, not giving someone the finger,’ he said.