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WORKING IN DENMARK

Denmark confirms deal to recruit 1,000 health staff from abroad

Denmark is to allow more people to migrate to the country to work in its social care sector under a new agreement announced by the government on Wednesday.

Published: 24 January 2024 16:51 CET
Denmark confirms deal to recruit 1,000 health staff from abroad
Danish politicians present a new agreement to hire 1,000 foreign care workers. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

A deal between the government and a majority in parliament will allow more people from abroad to be granted permits to work in the country’s social health sector as care workers or sosu-hjælpere in Danish.

The agreement was announced in a statement from the Ministry of Education and Research and later presented by the government at a briefing.

Specifically, it allows for a broadening of the positive list scheme, through which work permits are granted to people with qualifications in desired professions.

READ ALSO: Denmark cuts back on ‘positive list’ of jobs eligible for work permits

Government calculations estimate a likely shortage of 15,000 workers in the social care sector by 2035.

A quota set by the agreement will allow 1,000 of these to be filled by foreign staff by giving them access to work permits through the positive list.

“The labour shortage is by far the biggest problem for our health system and elderly care, so it makes no sense for us to get in the way of skilled foreign healthcare professionals who want to work in Denmark,” health minister Sophie Løhde said in the government statement.

Minister for Immigration and Integration Kaare Dybvad Bek added that “we need more labour in our health sector.”

“I am therefore pleased that we are now expanding the positive list so that up to 1,000 social and healthcare workers can obtain residence and work permits,” he said.

READ ALSO: Denmark to speed up authorisation process for foreign medics

The minister was quoted by broadcaster DR as saying the agreement is “an important step towards solving our recruitment challenges”.

Bek’s party, governing Social Democrats, have previously been sceptical about attracting more foreign labour to Denmark.

The immigration minister said he does not believe that the agreement represents a relaxation of immigration policy.

“It is important that we separate immigration policy from foreign labour. We give tens of thousands of residence permits to workers every year and I don’t consider these things to belong together,” he told DR.

The agreement may only be the first of a number of ways Denmark attempts to tackle its labour shortage in the sector with foreign labour.

Earlier this month, the government said it was in talks with India and the Philippines over a potential deal to bring in social carers from those countries.

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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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