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WORKING IN DENMARK

Denmark’s ‘non-Western’ immigrants triple parents’ earnings

The children of people who immigrated to Denmark from non-Western countries earn three times as much as their parents, figures from Statistics Denmark, released on Monday, show.

Published: 11 December 2023 17:35 CET
Denmark’s 'non-Western' immigrants triple parents’ earnings
Illustration photo. Statistics show a rapid increase in the median wage for the children of non-Western immigrants to Denmark. Photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash

While a higher income for 30-39 year-olds compared to their parents at the same age is common, the difference is significantly steeper for persons whose parents are immigrants from outside of Europe and other Western countries, the agency said in a press release.

A study by the Statistics agency found that the median income of 30-39 year-old male children of non-Western immigrants in 2022 was 375,800 kroner. Their fathers, at the same age, had a median income of 114,300 kroner.

For males of the same age with Danish heritage, the median incomes are 430,900 kroner (2022 group) compared to 374,600 (fathers).

“The median income has increased more among children of immigrants than for persons of Danish heritage – in relation to their fathers. But at the same time, the median income in 2022 is higher among men of Danish heritage then children of immigrants from non-Western countries,” the author of the study, Magnus Nørtoft, said in the statement.

Over half of mothers of the immigrant children had no income in the years included in the study. That means that the median income for the mothers was 0 kroner, while it was 318,000 kroner for their daughters in 2022.

The analysis primarily focuses on male immigrants due to the difficulty to the analysis presented by low employment by mothers during the relevant, years, Statistics Denmark writes.

A relatively large proportion of the fathers in the immigrant group were also not employed at the time relevant to the study, which explains the low median wage for this group.

A chart comparing the median incomes between mothers and daughters (left) and sons and fathers (right) between Danish (green) and non-Western immigrant (blue) people in Denmark. Graphic: Statistics Denmark

Statistics Denmark, as well as many authorities and public agencies in Denmark categorise people considered not of Danish heritage into two groups: ‘immigrants’ and ‘descendants’ of immigrants (‘efterkommere’).

A person is considered to be Danish if she or he has at least one parent who is a Danish citizen and was born in Denmark. People defined as ‘immigrants’ and ‘descendants’ do not fulfil those criteria. The difference between the two is that an ‘immigrant’ was born outside of Denmark, while a ‘descendant’ was born in Denmark. 

Meanwhile, all EU countries along with Andorra, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Vatican are considered ‘Western’.

Everywhere else – all of Latin America, Africa and Asia – is ‘non-Western’.

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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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