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Less work for the low-skilled?

Original title: Minder werk voor laagopgeleiden?

Almost a quarter of workers and jobseekers in the Netherlands are educated to pre-vocational secondary level or lower. Policymakers have been concerned for several decades about the labour market position of this group. They fear that demand for low-skilled staff will fall in the future in the face of the ongoing development of information technology and competition from low-wage countries.

This report puts these concerns into perspective; it describes the expectations of policymakers and the status of the scientific debate and links these to actual developments on the labour market. The number of low-skilled jobs is found to have remained virtually unchanged over the last 20 years, while the number of low-skilled workers has fallen. The report describes what this has meant for the labour market position of the low-skilled.