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WORKING IN DENMARK

Denmark announces boosted unemployment benefits for retraining

The coming draft 2024 budget is to offer some people who receive job insurance, ‘dagpenge’, 110 percent of the regular benefit rate by training in a sector where there is a labour shortage.

Published: 28 August 2023 17:12 CEST
Denmark announces boosted unemployment benefits for retraining
Illustration file photo: The government wants to give additional incentives for retraining to unemployed over-30s. Photo: Celina Dahl/Ritzau Scanpix

The option to receive more money from Denmark’s unemployment insurance dagpenge system, by taking a professional qualification (erhvervsuddannelse) within a sector where labour is in short supply, could be made permanent next year.

The draft 2024 budget, which will be presented this week, will make a current, temporary back-to-work scheme permanent, the Ministry of Employment said in a statement on Monday.

The cost of the proposal to the state will be around 230 million kroner next year and 300 kroner per year thereafter, the ministry said.

A temporary version of the scheme is already in place, having been reintroduced for the second half of 2023 based on an earlier version from 2020. It allows people who are receiving dagpenge unemployment insurance to receive 110 percent of the monthly payment to which they are already entitled, by enrolling on and attending a course at a professional college within a sector approved for the scheme.

People over the age of 30 who have no qualifications, or whose qualifications are obsolete, are eligible for the scheme.

The arrangement will continue permanently from 2024, the government proposes.

What is dagpenge? 

If you become unemployed in Denmark you can be eligible for unemployment benefits comprising up to 90 percent of your previous salary.

Unemployment benefits, known as dagpenge, come from membership of a private association known as an A-kasse, short for arbejdsløshedskasse, and don’t automatically apply if you lose your job. You have to fulfil some requirements first in order to be eligible.

People who work in Denmark for foreign companies and foreign people living in Denmark can be eligible for dagpenge if they are A-kasse members and fulfil requirements specific to their situations.

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Results from the temporary scheme suggest that it is successful in promoting enrolments to courses in areas where there is a work shortage, according to the ministry.

Around 2,800 people started a professional college course on the 110 percent dagpenge rate between August 1st 2020 and December 31st 2022, ministry figures state.

Typical sectors with intakes from the scheme are social care, administration, machine operation, and business-to-business.

“We need more trained people so we can achieve our ambition of better welfare and green transition. That’s we it will be good to make this scheme permanent,” Employment Minister Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen said in a statement.

“I’m convinced it will lead to more unemployed taking a professional course,” she said.

“Finances are naturally important to individuals and over-30s typically have higher recurring costs from their homes and families. With this scheme we are helping more people to go in the direction of trained work and in the end, putting more staff in care homes and more hands at industrial workplaces around the country,” she said.

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WORKING IN DENMARK

How will Denmark’s new rules on recording working hours affect you?

From July this year, all people working in Denmark will have to document any deviations from their agreed working hours. Here's how it's going to work.

Published: 13 May 2024 13:13 CEST
Updated: 13 May 2024 15:14 CEST
How will Denmark's new rules on recording working hours affect you?

On January 23rd, Denmark’s parliament voted through a law that, among other things, requires all Danish employers to introduce a working hours registration system that makes it possible to measure the daily working hours of each individual employee. 

The requirement, which comes into force on July 1st, implements a 2019 judgement of the EU Court, which stated that all member states needed to bring in laws requiring employers to record how many hours per week each employee is working.

The bill is built on an agreement reached on June 30th last year between the Confederation of Danish Employers, the Danish Trade Union Confederation, and Denmark’s white collar union, the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations. 

Will everyone working in Denmark now need to keep a detailed record of the hours they put in each day? 

No. Workers will only need to register any deviations from the working hours they have already agreed or been scheduled. So long as they stick to their scheduled hours, they never need to open the app, website, or other time registration system their organisation has set up. 

If they have to come in early for an interview, however, or do a bit of preparation for a meeting the next day in the evening, they will be expected to log those extra hours. 

Similarly, if they pop out for a dentist’s appointment, or to get a haircut, those reductions in working hours should all be noted down. 

What do employers need to do? 

All employers need to set up and maintain a detailed record of the actual hours worked by their employees, but the law gives them a lot of flexibility over how to do this, insisting only that the record be “objective, reliable and accessible”. 

They could do it in the old-fashioned way using a shared Excel spreadsheet, or, as most probably will, use an app such as Timetastic from the UK, ConnectTeam from the US, or Denmark’s zTime or Timelog.

To make it easier for their employees, employers can fill their scheduled hours into the time registration system in advance, so that workers only need to make a log of any deviations.  

Under the law, employers are required to keep these records for five years.

Employees empowered to set their own schedule — so called self-organisers — are exempt from the law, but as the law states that such people should be able to reorganise their own working time “in its entirety” and that this power should be enshrined in their contracts, this is only expected to apply to the most senior tier of executives. 

Who will be able to see my working hours? 

Each employee should only have access to their own data, which is covered by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and should not be able to see a detailed record of hours worked by their colleagues. 

Managers, however, will have access to the working hours records made by their subordinates. 

Will the legislation put limits on how many hours I can work? 

Yes, but in theory those hours already are limited for almost all employees by collective bargaining agreements. 

The new rule is intended to make sure that employees do not work more than 48 hours per week on average over a period of four months, the minimum standard under EU law, known as the 48-hour rule.

People in certain professions can, however, work longer than the 48-hours if they are covered by a so-called “opt-out”. 

Won’t it just be an additional hassle? 

The Danish Business Authority, the government agency which is supposed to support businesses in Denmark, estimates that keeping the time registration system up to date will only take between one to three minutes of employees’ time. 

In addition, it estimates that as much as 80 percent of employees in the country already keep a record of their time. 

Henrik Baagøe Fredelykke, a union official at Lego, said in an article on the website of the HK union, that he believed that the records could serve as an “eye-opener” about unrecorded overtime. 

What was crucial, he said, was that the system was used primarily to ensure that there was no systemic deviation from working hours and not to police employees. 

“It must not be used for monitoring by the management, who can come and say ‘whoa, why didn’t you work 7.4 hours yesterday?’,” Fredelykke said.

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