Job switching is slowing, while payroll pressure and scarce skills keep workforce choices difficult.
On Monday morning, a small employer studies next month’s roster beside a sales forecast that has become steadily less reliable. One employee may leave. Another role no longer has enough work behind it. Payroll is still due on the same date, while customers are taking longer to decide.
The latest CBS figures give this familiar scene a harder edge. In 2025, fewer employees left their main job because they had found another position or planned to start a business. At the same time, economic reasons and labour conflict accounted for a larger share of job endings.
This is where a softer labour market becomes complicated. Staff may stay because their alternatives feel less certain. Employers may still need to reconsider roles because orders, hours or margins have weakened. Natural turnover offers less room to adjust quietly.
The labour market has changed direction
CBS reports that an average of 618,000 employees left their main job each quarter in 2025, down from 677,000 in 2022. The share leaving mainly for a new job or their own business fell from 42.3 percent to 37.7 percent.
Meanwhile, the combined share citing economic reasons or labour conflict rose from 4.9 percent to 8.1 percent. That measure describes employees’ stated reasons for leaving their main job. It covers more than formal redundancy, including strained employment relationships alongside cutbacks and reorganisations.
The current labour market adds context. Dutch unemployment reached 4.0 percent in August 2026, with 408,000 people unemployed. At the end of the second quarter, 375,000 vacancies were still open, equal to 95 vacancies for every 100 unemployed people.
I read this as a labour market that has cooled without becoming easy. Recruitment pressure may feel less frantic, but capable technicians, planners, care workers and account managers have not suddenly become simple to replace. Their knowledge often sits in customer relationships, exception handling and daily routines that never reached a manual.
A role is more than its monthly wage
When revenue becomes uncertain, employers naturally look at payroll. Collectively agreed hourly wages, including special payments, were 4.0 percent higher in August than a year earlier. Contractual hourly labour costs were 3.9 percent higher.
The temptation is to identify the largest recurring cost and reduce it. Yet a role should be read through three questions: what work remains, what value or continuity the person protects, and what cash the business can carry.
Consider the employer looking at that Monday roster. Leaving a vacancy open may save a salary. It may also move the work into overtime, delayed invoicing, agency labour or the owner’s evenings. Removing a planning role can lower payroll while causing billable staff to spend more time organising work. The saving remains visible. The displaced cost hides elsewhere.
The opposite mistake is possible too. Loyalty cannot make an unsupported role affordable. Keeping every position unchanged while demand falls may protect the team for a few months, then weaken the whole company. A humane decision still needs financial honesty.
A useful view is therefore short and concrete. The next 13 weeks of expected receipts, payroll, tax, pension payments, holiday accrual and major supplier bills will often say more than an annual budget. Beside that cash view, the employer needs an honest map of the work: what has disappeared, what has merely paused, and what customers still expect.
Economic pressure needs an employment process
A difficult trading period does not by itself complete an economic dismissal. UWV states that an employer normally needs its permission when an employee does not agree, unless an applicable collective agreement places the assessment with an independent dismissal committee.
The employer must substantiate why jobs disappear, which functions are affected and why dismissal is necessary. The correct selection sequence matters. So does the possibility of redeployment, including suitable training where appropriate. If the same work returns within 26 weeks, the former employee may need to be offered the position.
For a small business, this means the financial story and the employment story must agree. Sales expectations, workload, job descriptions, organisation charts and management accounts should describe the same change. A decision made from frustration, or from one poor month, can become difficult to defend and damaging to communicate.
Labour conflict deserves equal care. Under margin pressure, a disagreement can quickly be recast as a staffing problem. Sometimes the conflict points to poor performance. Sometimes it reveals unclear duties, unmanaged workload or a founder who has delayed a necessary conversation. Chronology, facts and written communication help separate those possibilities.
Flexibility is not a free escape route
Some employers will respond by moving work toward temporary staff, agency workers or self-employed contractors. That choice carries its own limits.
The Dutch flex-work framework is tightening. From 2028, zero-hours contracts are intended to give way to bandwidth contracts with agreed minimum and maximum hours. Agency workers are due at least equivalent employment conditions from 31 December 2026. These changes make uncertain demand harder to place indefinitely outside normal workforce planning.
Nor does calling someone a zzp contractor settle the tax position. The Belastingdienst has resumed enforcement of employment-relationship rules. The way the work is directed, organised and embedded in the company carries more weight than the label on the agreement.
That brings us back to the Monday roster. The employer’s real decision is not simply whom to keep or release. It is which work the business can support, which capability it cannot afford to lose, and whether the records match the conclusion.
Slower job switching gives employers fewer easy exits through ordinary turnover. It also gives employees less confidence that another job is waiting. Clear conversation becomes more important, not less. The strongest workforce decision is rarely the quickest one. It is the decision that can be explained calmly to the employee, carried by the cash, and understood six months later.
If payroll pressure is forcing difficult workforce choices, seek advice before the financial decision becomes an employment problem.
The data, sourcing, and analysis behind this article were conducted by Linda Pavan Geraedts. AI was not used to identify sources, build the factual basis, or produce the analytical judgment contained here. AI was used only as a drafting aid. The final English text was personally reviewed, edited, and approved by Linda Pavan Geraedts before publication.
References
- Vaker ontslag om bedrijfseconomische redenen, minder vaak vanwege nieuwe baan | CBS
- CBS - Latest unemployment and employment position
- CBS - Vacancies and remaining labour-market tightness
- CBS - Employer confidence and economic uncertainty
- CBS - Business failures as a narrow part of the employment signal
- UWV - Economic dismissal route and evidence burden
- Rijksoverheid - Flex-work reform and the changing buffer around permanent staff
- Belastingdienst - False self-employment enforcement
