DHL will maintain a local office in the Brussels area, but 523 people will be let go from the current head office in Diegem. A further 231 jobs will be lost at the sorting centre DHL Aviation, and 34 more at European Air Transport (EAT), which covers Europe and part of the Middle East and North Africa. Unions at DHL Aviation are already in discussions over 94 redundancies previously announced.

However, DHL stressed that the Brussels hub would remain an important part of the network, and the job losses would not affect the number of flights out of Brussels or the futures of crew and maintenance personnel.

After hearing the announcement, Flemish minister-president Kris Peeters immediately contacted DHL for talks. He later referred to an offer by the company for laid-off workers to move to jobs in Bonn, Leipzig and Prague as “an extraordinarily cynical message to the workers affected”. In a newspaper interview at the weekend, Peeters regretted that the company had not consulted with his government before announcing its plans and said that “the economic motive for moving the headquarters from Brussels to Bonn completely escapes me.”

Employers’ organisation Voka said that the DHL decision was “a severe blow” to jobs in the Brussels region; one in three of the employees in the logistics sector at Zaventem live in Brussels. Voka director-general Karel Lowette said that the government had made little use of its own “Start-plan” for Zaventem, which was intended to make the airport more economically diverse.

Peeters was also busy last week with another sensitive industrial dossier: the future of Opel Antwerp, following the decision by parent company General Motors (GM) not to sell its European business. Last week, GM Europe boss Nick Reilly said the future of the plant was still “uncertain”.

Opel Antwerp is now focusing its efforts on winning a bid to manufacture two new SUVs in order to ensure the plant’s survival. In April last year, then-CEO Carl-Peter Forster promised this deal, but GM has subsequently back-pedalled. Unions are now threatening legal action if the SUV production – which they see as a firm commitment – does not materialise. Opel Antwerp employs 2,300 workers, and if the SUV production line comes to Antwerp, only 750 jobs will have to go.

“Following Opel and DHL, there will be other cases to come,” Peeters told De Standaard. “The crisis in the labour market is a major one, and the worst is still to come. Flanders will lose 44,000 jobs in the next two years, and anyone who thought the economy would be business as usual is on the wrong track.”

The solution, he said, was not to act defensively but to build economic policies to help create jobs – and carry those policies out. “The Start-plan exists,” he said, before pointing out that the plan for airport development is at the moment at a standstill because of a pending legal objection from a family in Meise.

According to Jan Scheers of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Belgium is likely to lose more head offices in the future. The reasons are political, fiscal and economic, but governments have paid little or no attention to warnings “because politicians are more concerned with themselves,” he said. The tax system and the effect it has on wage costs, he continued, is of crucial importance.

The exodus of head offices is “the result of years of imbalances,” according to economist Geert Noels. “Belgium thought it had a sort of natural right to certain activities, but that was simply an overestimate of its own powers of attraction. For a long time we were more attractive than other countries, but because of a variety of aspects, such as high costs, a change in market focus or social unrest, we lost that advantageous position,” he said.

Peeters, who once headed the small business organisation Unizo, called for a plan to transform Flanders. “Flanders has gotten a little bit lazy and work-shy,” he said. “We have to speed up the process of transforming our industry because we are competing with our neighbours, and we can’t allow any more time to be lost.”

• Meanwhile, talks between unions and management of chemicals company Bayer broke down last week when unions rejected new terms regarding restructuring. Bayer employs 842 people, but the Antwerp facility is competing with another Bayer factory in Urdingen, Germany, over how to achieve an annual cut of 200,000 tonnes in the production of polycarbonate, a common plastic that has suffered in recent years from a sharp fall in demand. Bayer Antwerp produces 230,000 tonnes, while Urdingen makes 300,000 tonnes a year.