Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

IMMIGRATION

‘I think about my salary all the time’: Foreign workers risk losing right to stay in Sweden

Less than four months after Sweden doubled its income requirement for foreign workers, the government is considering raising it even further. What's the impact on work permit holders living in Sweden?

Published: 21 February 2024 09:48 CET
'I think about my salary all the time': Foreign workers risk losing right to stay in Sweden
Thousands of foreign workers already in Sweden risk being squeezed out by higher salary requirements. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix

Iryna Halubuskaya dusts the furniture of a Stockholm apartment with a constant worry on her mind: Is she making enough money to keep her work visa?

When the 41-year-old arrived in Sweden from Belarus six years ago, her work visa required her to make at least 13,000 kronor ($1,250) a month in order to stay in the country.

On November 1st, the government more than doubled the income requirement for foreigners from outside the European Union, to 27,360 kronor or 80 percent of the median Swedish wage.

This month, the government announced it wants to raise the level further to 34,200 kronor in 2025, matching the median wage.

Paid hourly, Halubuskaya has had to increase her workload significantly, putting in hours on evenings and weekends.

“I think about my salary all the time,” she told AFP.

EXPLAINED:

The coalition government, led by conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and propped up by the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, has pledged to limit migration since coming to power in 2022.

“We want to change the nature of the immigrant workforce… and focus on highly skilled labour”, Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told AFP.

She is “convinced that there are people in Sweden who should be able to do” low-paid jobs, whether they are Swedish citizens or people of foreign origin who have come as refugees or asylum seekers.

Stenergard emphasised the high unemployment rate which hit 8.1 percent in January in seasonally-adjusted figures, according to Statistics Sweden.

Jennyfer Aydogdyeva, Halubuskaya’s boss, runs a small cleaning business, Stadfen (The Cleaning Fairy), with some 30 employees. Six of them are affected by the tougher requirement.

Doubled overnight

In order to help her “girls” – most of whom are mothers – stay in Sweden, she is trying to find them more work.

“I didn’t think they were going to more than double the income criteria overnight, I didn’t think they could do that to a person living here”, she said.

According to the Migration Agency, 14,991 work visa holders did not meet the income threshold required to remain in Sweden, after it was raised in November – with the two most affected sectors being restaurants and cleaning services.

Migrant workers represent a small part of the Swedish labour market. There are some 63,477 migrants with a work visa in the country of 10.4 million inhabitants.

Vladan Lausevic, a member of the association Work Permit Holders, called the government measures discriminatory.

“The centre-right parties in Europe have a history of liberalising labour immigration, but now they’re sending a different message to the voters saying ‘We have control and we will prevent more people from coming to Sweden’,” Lausevic told AFP.

Labour shortage

It is too early to say what impact the income requirement will, according to Andrea Spehar, director of the Centre on Global Migration (CGM) at the University of Gothenburg.

“If you compare Sweden with other countries, labour migration is fairly low,” she explained.

“This is above all a reform targeting people of foreign origin” already present in the country.

In Spehar’s view, the government wants to encourage employers to recruit people already living in the country rather than third-country nationals who are willing to work for less.

For the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR), the reform does not take into account the already existing shortages in the healthcare sector.

Many municipalities, mainly in the north of the country, are struggling to find “enough nurses, care assistants and other staff”, Anders Barane, a senior advisor at SKR, said, explaining that they have until now relied on foreign labour.

The government’s move has raised eyebrows in a country where there is no minimum wage – salary levels are instead negotiated sector by sector and regulated by collective agreements between employers and unions.

Some employers have raised their foreign employees’ wages in order to allow them to stay in Sweden.

“This is not the right way to go”, Barane said, fearing a “spiral” that would push up the median wage, making it even more difficult for foreign workers to enter the country.

“I pay my employees a salary above what is recommended by the collective agreement, but it’s still not enough,” Aydogdyeva lamented.

Article by AFP’s Nioucha Zakavati

Member comments

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

WORK PERMITS

Business leaders: Work permit threshold ‘has no place in Swedish labour model’

Sweden's main business group has attacked a proposal to exempt some jobs from a new minimum salary for work permits, saying it is "unacceptable" political interference in the labour model and risks seriously affecting national competitiveness.

Published: 25 April 2024 17:37 CEST
Updated: 26 April 2024 06:11 CEST
Business leaders: Work permit threshold 'has no place in Swedish labour model'

The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise said in its response to the government’s consultation, submitted on Thursday afternoon, that it not only opposed the proposal to raise the minimum salary for a work permit to Sweden’s median salary (currently 34,200 kronor a month), but also opposed plans to exempt some professions from the higher threshold. 

“To place barriers in the way of talent recruitment by bringing in a highly political salary threshold in combination with labour market testing is going to worsen the conditions for Swedish enterprise in both the short and the long term, and risks leading to increased fraud and abuse,” the employer’s group said.   

The group, which represents businesses across most of Sweden’s industries, has been critical of the plans to further raise the salary threshold for work permits from the start, with the organisation’s deputy director general, Karin Johansson, telling The Local this week that more than half of those affected by the higher threshold would be skilled graduate recruits Swedish businesses sorely need.   

But the fact that it has not only rejected the higher salary threshold, but also the proposed system of exemptions, will nonetheless come as a blow to Sweden’s government, and particular the Moderate Party led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, which has long claimed to be the party of business. 

The confederation complained that the model proposed in the conclusions of the government inquiry published in February would give the government and political parties a powerful new role in setting salary conditions, undermining the country’s treasured system of collective bargaining. 

The proposal for the higher salary threshold, was, the confederation argued, “wrong in principle” and did “not belong in the Swedish labour market”. 

“That the state should decide on the minimum salary for certain foreign employees is an unacceptable interference in the Swedish collective bargaining model, where the parties [unions and employers] weigh up various needs and interested in negotiations,” it wrote. 

In addition, the confederation argued that the proposed system where the Sweden Public Employment Service and the Migration Agency draw up a list of exempted jobs, which would then be vetted by the government, signified the return of the old system of labour market testing which was abolished in 2008.

“The government agency-based labour market testing was scrapped because of it ineffectiveness, and because it was unreasonable that government agencies were given influence over company recruitment,” the confederation wrote. 

“The system meant long handling times, arbitrariness, uncertainty for employers and employees, as well as an indirect union veto,” it added. “Nothing suggests it will work better this time.” 

For a start, it said, the Public Employment Service’s list of professions was inexact and outdated, with only 179 professions listed, compared to 430 monitored by Statistics Sweden. This was particularly the case for new skilled roles within industries like battery manufacturing. 

“New professions or smaller professions are not caught up by the classification system, which among other things is going to make it harder to recruit in sectors which are important for the green industrial transition,” the confederation warned. 

Rather than implement the proposals outlined in the inquiry’s conclusions, it concluded, the government should instead begin work on a new national strategy for international recruitment. 

“Sweden instead needs a national strategy aimed at creating better conditions for Swedish businesses to be able to attract, recruit and retain international competence.”

SHOW COMMENTS