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STRIKES

Is Norway facing the prospect of strikes in April? 

Annual wage talks have broken down between Norway's biggest labour union and employer organisation. If mediation talks fail to bear fruit, strikes could follow.

Published: 3 April 2023 13:09 CEST
Pictured are workers at a meeting.
This is the likelihood of Norway heading on strike later this month. Pictured are workers at a meeting. Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

Talks between the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) and the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO) over the annual wage settlement ended last week without an agreement being struck. 

“It wasn’t possible to make any progress in the negotiations”, Peggy Hessen Følsvik, leader of LO, said of the breakdown. 

 With talks breaking down, the two parties will enter mediation with the state mediator. 

Over the past eight years, wage growth has only been marginally higher than inflation. This year, LO has committed to ensuring workers get a wage rise that outpaces inflation. 

According to a government estimate, inflation is forecast to be 4.9 percent in Norway in 2023. This means LO is after a wage rise in the region of five percent. 

LO has argued that high wage rises for managers and executives and large profit margins for firms mean that businesses can afford the requested increases. 

Meanwhile, employers say that using inflation as a basis for wage negotiations isn’t suitable, as it doesn’t offer an indicator of firms’ profitability for 2023. 

Mediation talks will begin on April 14th, with a deadline of April 15th. The deadline can be extended at the will of both parties. However, LO has said it is willing to call strikes from the 16th. 

How likely is a strike? 

Essentially, a strike is entirely possible if the two parties fail to agree to a deal during mediation. Both parties have held their cards quite close to their chest, so how far apart they are is unclear. 

This year’s negotiations are for an interim settlement. 

The industries and sectors that could strike will be announced before the mediation talks. When the sectors or workers who may strike are revealed, a rough idea of how disruptive the industrial action will begin to form. 

If the proposed strikes threaten mass disruption, then the bargaining position of LO will be stronger in mediation. LO can take out around 185,000 workers on strike if it wishes to do so. 

Should the two parties in Norway be close to an agreement, they may find a solution in mediation or choose to extend the deadline to push through a deal. 

Strikes in Norway are pretty common. Over the past year, workers in the aviation, oil and gas, the private kindergarten sector, and teachers have all gone on strike. 

Furthermore, they tend to strike in waves – meaning that the strike will gradually be ramped up rather than have all the workers taken out at once. 

Norway’s government can choose to end strikes and force two parties to mediation if they feel the industrial actions threaten the health and safety of the general public. Although, it has also ended strikes when the risk to public health isn’t always straightforward. 

Once a strike is broken up by the government, the two parties are forced to a national mediation board. 

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WORKING IN NORWAY

Why overqualified foreigners in Norway struggle to find work

Norway is one of the worst countries in Europe when it comes to overqualified foreign labour being stuck in jobs that don’t make the best use of their skills, a new analysis has found. 

Published: 23 April 2024 11:38 CEST
Why overqualified foreigners in Norway struggle to find work

Norway is one of many European countries struggling with “brain waste”, which is where immigrants struggle to find suitable full-time work or are overqualified for their roles due to their education not being recognised. 

The findings are part of an investigation by Lighthouse Reports, the Financial Times, El País and Unbias The News that found that most European countries fail to provide good job opportunities to educated foreigners – potentially at the cost of their labour forces and economies. 

“While the results differ slightly between labour market outcomes, a consistent pattern emerges: immigrants lag behind natives everywhere, but brain waste is worst in Southern Europe, Norway, and Sweden,” the report read. 

Some of the metrics used to measure brain waste were the proportion of foreign residents who were overqualified for their role, underemployed (meaning they weren’t working as much as they could), or unemployed. 

In Norway, 27.6 percent of university-educated Norwegians were overqualified for their roles, according to the report. Meanwhile, just over half of the university-educated immigrant population were overqualified for their job. 

This figure made Norway one of the countries with the largest raw difference in the percentage of the native population being overqualified compared to the immigrant population. 

Furthermore, the number of immigrants who were underemployed, 3.9 percent, was more than double the rate of Norwegians in the same position. 

The investigation used figures from Eurostat between 2017 and 2022. 

Norway’s Directorate of Integration and Diversity has recently investigated the obstacles facing the country’s foreign population in the workplace. 

Its report found that immigrants faced barriers both when trying to progress their careers or simply trying to get their foot in the door. 

Immigrants working in Norway were also more likely to leave working life earlier or lose their jobs. 

READ ALSO: The biggest barriers foreigners in Norway face at work

Factors such as working in temp positions, physically taxing occupations, and industries exposed to economic turbulence contributed to this. 

However, a lack of Norwegian proficiency, a lack of relevant skills and poor health also played a part. 

Discrimination prevented immigrants from entering the workplace and affected those who were employed. 

“More and more people in the population have contact with immigrants in working life, and most experience that contact as mainly positive. At the same time, one in four immigrants has experienced discrimination in the workplace, and this discrimination can occur in different forms and in different working situations,” the report read.

The directorate also said that most companies didn’t have concrete measures to try and promote diversity.

One factor holding back immigrants in Norway was their Norwegian language skills, the report said. 

While Norwegian skills were moving in the right direction, less than half of foreigners in the country had advanced Norwegian language skills (level B2 according to the European framework) after completing language training.

Meanwhile, Lighthouse Reports’ investigation found that brain waste in Norway varied from profession to profession. For example, Norway was one of a number of countries where college-educated immigrants were more likely to be doctors. 

Immigrants with a university education in IT-related subjects were also far less likely to be overqualified. There, the difference between migrants being overqualified compared to natives was just 2 percent. 

However, physical and engineering science technicians, engineering professionals (excluding electrotechnology), and those who have studied education at a university level were the immigrant groups in Norway most likely to be overqualified. 

One thing to note is that immigrants who obtained their qualifications in Norway were far less likely to be overqualified than those who got their degrees outside of Norway, even if they still fared worse than natives overall. 

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