"Part of the solution": Why Provençale is focusing on staff accommodation

When we met Georges Eischen in a meeting room at Provençale in early September, dozens of flats in Bonnevoie – just a few kilometres away – were standing empty. Such has been the case since June.

The co-owner of the food wholesale company – one of the country's largest employers with around 1,700 staff – is not happy about this situation. Georges Eischen hopes that this will change in the coming weeks. The aim is, in fact, to let the flats to the company's employees.

The idea of allocating flats to staff "has been on our minds for ten years now", says Eischen. The starting point, he explains, is the difficult situation in the property market, which is preventing young people in particular from finding a place to live. "For anyone earning the minimum wage – or even 20 or 30 per cent more – it's impossible to buy a property these days." Those who rent, on the other hand, can hardly save any capital or build a future for themselves. And those who commute across the border lose a lot of their time in traffic: which also means less time for further education or family. It's a problem that can't simply be solved by a pay rise. "If we gave every employee an extra 1,000 euros a month, this business would cease to exist, " says Eischen.

In the past, it used to be possible to build a life for oneself through hard work. Eischen calls this the "deal de l'immigré". "We used to have people who worked 100 hours of overtime a month and went home with two salaries." And then they'd spend their weekends working on their house. Today, that no longer works. "Even at 38 hours of overtime [a month], the alarm bells are ringing."