Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

WORKING IN DENMARK

Danish coalition party wants ‘overtaking lane’ for hiring internationals

Lars Løkke Rasmussen, leader of coalition partner the Moderate party, says that Denmark’s businesses should be allowed to freely hire international staff, provided they comply with trade union agreements.

Published: 29 August 2023 16:48 CEST
Danish coalition party wants 'overtaking lane' for hiring internationals
Moderate party leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen is keen for Denmark to recruit foreign labour. Photo: Emil Nicolai Helms/Ritzau Scanpix

Rasmussen, who has regularly advocated for more skilled foreign professionals on the Danish labour market, said that companies should be able to freely hire from abroad provided they have a collective bargaining agreement (overenskomst) with a trade union and comply with its terms.

The Moderate Party presented 12 proposals on Tuesday all aimed at increasing foreign labour in Denmark.

That includes a proposal to give companies an “overtaking lane” to hire staff from abroad, provided they are covered by a bargaining agreement.

“There are pay limit schemes, positive lists, all sorts of rules that SIRI [the Danish Agency for International Recruitment and Integration, ed.] has to decide whether people live up to,” Rasmussen said, referring to the agency that processes work permit applications.

READ ALSO:

“We propose an overtaking lane – a proposal that trumps all of this. That is, if you are an employer who has a collective bargaining agreement and a union-covered business, you should basically be able to bring people in on a wage that complies with the bargaining agreement,” he said.

The plan would have the added effect of providing incentive for companies to sign collective bargaining agreements, he argued.

According to the Moderate leader, who is also the foreign minister, around a quarter of the Danish labour market is not covered by a collective bargaining agreement, a contract signed between trade unions and employer confederations to provide the basis of salary and other working conditions.

The proposal to free up access to foreign labour has not yet been discussed with the other two coalition parties, the Social Democrats and the Liberals,

The three parties in the government would need to agree on the plan before a bill is likely to be tabled.

“The proposal we have should speak directly to a good social democrat because it’s a real tribute to the Danish labour model,” Rasmussen said.

“This is a nudge to the Danish trade union movement – not least at a time when it can be difficult to make trade unions attractive,” he said.

“We [in Denmark, ed.] have a high level of organisation and a low level of conflict. We want to give good reason to maintain that,” he said.

The Moderate leader repeated during the press briefing the government’s new mantra that labour is the new currency, given the shortage that has now impacted the labour market for a number of years.

The number of people on the labour market is expected to decline between now and 2030, and foreign recruitment will lessen the impact of this, the government has said.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

POLITICS

EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Denmark's culture minister said on Monday he hoped to use copyright law to bring an end to the controversial new trend of using deep fake videos in politics. Here's the background.

Published: 13 May 2024 15:13 CEST
EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, who represents the Moderate Party, warned that the technique, used in recent videos by the far-right Danish People’s Party and libertarian Liberal Alliance were the “top level of  a slippery slope that could end up undermining our trust in one another and making every political message, newspaper article and artistic publication a potential battleground for whether it is true or false”. 

Which parties have used deepfake video in campaigning? 

The Danish People’s Party at the end of last month issued an AI-generated deepfake video showing a spoof speech in which Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to announce that Ascension Day, Easter and Christmas would no longer be public holidays, and that they would all be replaced by the Muslim festival of Eid as the country’s only holiday. 

This was a satirical reference to the government’s unpopular decision to abolish Store bededag, or “Great Prayer Day” as a public holiday. 

The video was clearly labelled as AI-generated, and ends with the Danish People’s Party’s leader, Morten Messeschmidt, awakening from a nightmare. 

The Liberal Alliance also released a video for Great Prayer Day, in which it used AI to turn Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S), Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) into eccentric-looking characters similar to those in the film’s of the US director Wes Anderson.

What kind of a stir have the videos caused in Denmark? 

Denmark’s Minister for Digitization, Marie Bjerre, who represents the centre-right Liberal Party, was sharply critical of the Danish People’s Party’s move. 

“I think it is way over the line for the Danish People’s Party to make a deepfake of a political opponent. I don’t think it’s proper either, and they shouldn’t do it,” she said. “It is also a problem for our democracy and society. Because with deepfakes, you can create material that looks extremely credible, which means that you can really spread misinformation. That is why it is also very serious that the Danish People’s Party is using deepfake for this kind of thing.” 

She said that such videos should only be allowed if the organisation making or distributing them have received consent from the person depicted. 

“If you want to make deepfakes of people, you must ask for permission. That will be the proper way to do it,” she said. 

Messerschmidt defended the video as light-hearted satire that at the same time educated Danish people about the new technology. 

“What we can do is show Danes how to use the new technologies and how to use them in a good way, like here in an entertaining and satirical way,” he said. 

Although Engel-Schmidt said he was concerned about the use of deepfake videos in politics, he acknowledged that the light-hearted videos released by the two parties were in themselves unlikely to deceive anyone.  

How does Engel-Schmidt hope to regulate such deepfake videos? 

He said he aimed to see whether copyright law could be used to regulate such videos.

Presumably this would mean seeing whether, under law, people have a right to the use of the own image, personality or voice, and can therefore forbid them from being used without permission. 

What do the experts say? 

Christiane Vejlø, one of Denmark’s leading experts on the relationship between people and technology, welcomed the government’s moves towards regulating deepfake videos, pointing to the impact they were already having on politics in other countries such as India and the US.

“There is no doubt that we will have to deal with this phenomenon. It has an impact on something that is most important to us in a democracy – namely trust and faith in other people,” she told Denmark’s public broadcaster DR.

In the current Indian election campaign, she said that deepfakes of popular Bollywood actors had been used to criticise the current government and encourage voters to vote for the opposition.

“In India and the USA we see politicians saying things they could never think of saying. We are getting an erosion of the truth,” she said. 

She said that even if the videos were clearly labelled as AI-generated, it did not necessarily make them unproblematic. 

“Even if you can see that it is a deepfake, it can still influence voters to think that there is something wrong with them [the politician] or that they look stupid,” she said. “We have a situation where another person is used as a digital hand puppet.” 

 
 

SHOW COMMENTS