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Danish work permit agency changes practice for hotel and restaurant interns

The Danish Agency for International Recruitment and Immigration (SIRI), which processes work permit applications, has confirmed it will adjust the way it assesses the salaries of hotel and restaurant workers in certain application types.

Published: 26 March 2024 16:30 CET
Danish work permit agency changes practice for hotel and restaurant interns
Illustration photo. Denmark will base assessment of work permit applications for internships on existing trade union agreements. Photo by David Valentine on Unsplash

In a statement on its website, SIRI said on Wednesday that it will “adjusts the practice on how to assess salary conditions for foreign interns in the hotel and restaurant industry”.

It will also change the way it assesses the “professional connection” of internship applications in the sector, it added.

When SIRI assesses applications for work permits, including for internships, from foreign nationals, it generally makes an assessment of whether the salary offered by the employer is in line with Danish labour market standards.

This means the agency is not just checking for too-low salaries, but also ones that are above market levels. The purpose of this is to ensure that the employment itself is genuine and not solely for the purpose of obtaining residence on behalf of the applicant.

READ ALSO: Danish authority confirms new wage data for work permit applications

The change in practice for internship applications means that the foreign interns will now be divided into two categories, interns in education and graduates, when their cases are processed.

“For interns still in education, SIRI will… assess that the salary offered is normal if it corresponds at least to the first salary level (during the first 12 months of internship, then the second salary level)” in relevant collective bargaining agreements, SIRI said in the statement

The bargaining agreements (overenskomster in Danish) in question set out salary and other working conditions for people working as interns in the restaurant and hotel sectors, and are agreed between employers and the two trade unions Horesta and 3F.

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“When assessing whether the salary offered graduate interns meets the Danish standards, SIRI will be using the salary levels for unskilled workers” in the hotel and restaurant collective bargaining agreements with Horesta and 3F, it said.

The change in practice takes effect from April 1st.

Essentially, it means that collective bargaining agreements with Horesta and 3F will now be used as a primary reference point when assessing whether the salary offered in an application for a work permit, related to an internship offer, can be approved.

In the statement, SIRI also said it will change the way it assesses the internship’s relevance – in other words, whether the internship offer matches the applicant’s educational background.

“In those cases where an educational programme does not in itself support a professional connection to the internship, the applicant must have passed a sufficient amount of subjects relevant to the internship, so that the subjects make up one semester’s worth of credits,” it stated.

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INTERVIEW

‘A noticeable change’: What Denmark’s plans to change family reunion rules mean

Olivia Scott, chair of the campaign group Marriage Without Borders, tells The Local that while the Danish government's plans to make it easier to bring a foreign spouse to the country are welcome, they don't go nearly far enough.

Published: 3 May 2024 17:12 CEST
'A noticeable change': What Denmark's plans to change family reunion rules mean

Scott, a Dane who is married to an American, told The Local that her organisation, Ægteskab Uden Grænser, had mixed views about the bill, which will give Danish international executives the same rights to bring a foreign wife to Denmark as foreign executives, halve the bank guarantee or bankgaranti those bringing a spouse to Denmark have to leave for their local municipality, and reduce language requirements for the Danish partner. 

“For some it will make a noticeable change,” she said of the bank guarantee change, “because it is going from being around 114,000 kroner to 57,000 kroner which is much more digestible, especially for younger people, so of course that’s welcome. But we just don’t think it should be there at all.”

As municipalities almost never draw funds from the deposits to support spouses who have come to Denmark, the system, she said, was actually costing them more in adminstration fees than they were gaining from it. “So it ends up becoming a cost for our municipalities and for our government, instead of serving the purpose it’s supposed to serve.” 

READ ALSO: What’s in the new law on bringing a foreign spouse to Denmark?

As for the plan to allow Danish executives returning to Denmark for work to bring a foreign wife and family under the same rules as apply to foreign executives, she said this followed a pattern in Denmark where only so called mønsterborgere, or “outstanding citizens” were welcome to bring spouses to the country. 

“Yes, there are some people that will benefit from this, and we’re always happy when there are regulations that change for the better,” she said. “But this is still just a small group.” 

Olivia Scott is chair of Marriage without Fronteirs. Photo: private

She said the attention being given to Danish executives in the bill simply served to emphasise the gap in the way regular Danes and “highly educated Danes with a lot of money” are seen by the government. 

“That this regulation is making it easier for highly educated individuals with good jobs, is, again, confirming this premise that it is only ‘outstanding citizens’ that we feel should be able to enjoy the ability to be family unified,” she said. 

The third part of the new law, which alters the language requirements for the Danish partner was, she said, welcome, as many Danes who wanted to bring a spouse to Denmark were being foreced to take a Danish exam to prove their ability to speak their own native language.  

“There has been a group of elderly gentleman that simply do not have the physical documentation that they passed their ninth grade. It’s called the afgangseksamen. It’s a physical document that they have lost over the last couple of decades, and so they have had to go and take a Danish test to certify their level of Danish, which is ridiculous because they’re Danish and they’ve lived and studying here their whole life.”

As for the final bit of the new bill, which will block spousal reunions if either the Dane or their partner has been charged or is under prosecution for a crime, Scott said Marriage without Borders supported the idea that someone who has been sentenced for comitting a hard crime is limited in their ability to get family reunification.

“But maybe there should be consideration paid to how long ago the crime was committed,” she said. 

In addition, she said, there was little evidence that foreign spouses tended to commit crimes, so the change would have little impact. 

“If you go and you look at statistics on foreign spouses family reunified with Danish citizens, the crime rate is lower in this specific group than it is among regular ethnic Danes.” 

Finally, she said that even if the bill represented a step forward, her organisation intended to keep pushing for additional relaxations of Denmark’s draconian family reunification rules. 

“Obviously, we hope that it’s going to go further, but we as an organisation are not going to be happy until the day when the rules for family reunion according to Danish law are equalised with those under EU law,” she said. “We cannot accept that the under EU law, you can come to the country as long as you can financially support yourself, and you can obtain permanent residency in five years, whereas for Danish laws, you are locked-into sometimes decades of struggles for no reason.” 

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