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Why 22,000 workers in Norway could strike from the end of the week

Should mediation talks fail to reach an agreement on wage rises, Norway’s largest trade union umbrella, LO, has announced that over 22,000 workers can strike from Sunday.

Published: 12 April 2023 13:56 CEST

Pictured is a business meeting.

Pictured is a business meeting.Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

The union group was required to announce how many workers could strike as part of the mediation process.

At the end of last month, talks between the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) and the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO) over wages broke down.

Mediation on talks, with assistance from the national mediator, will begin on Friday. If an agreement isn’t reached by Sunday, a strike may begin from 6am.
However, both parties can also agree to extend the mediation deadline to avoid strike action and dedicate more time to finding an agreement.

Ferry services and breweries are among the businesses that could be affected by the first wave of strikes. Meanwhile, another trade union group, YS, has announced it would take out 1,400 members on strike. These withdrawals would mainly concern security staff for shops and businesses.

LO has maintained throughout talks that it was pushing for a real wage increase for its members. 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.

“Norwegian workers have taken responsibility through several challenging years for Norwegian working life, with the pandemic and high price growth. Now we see that many companies are doing very well and profits are high. Our aim is to equalize differences between people and ensure that Norwegian workers get their share of the value creation,” Peggy Hessen Følsvik, leader of LO, said in a press release.

The 22,000 workers that could be taken on strike would represent a first wave. If an agreement isn’t reached, LO can take out up to 180,000 members on strike.

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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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