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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

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WORKING IN SWEDEN

‘Reassess your cultural background’: Key tips for foreign job hunters in Sweden

Many foreigners living in Sweden want to stay in the country but struggle to find a job, despite having relevant qualifications. The Local spoke to three experts for their advice.

Published: 7 May 2024 09:00 CEST
'Reassess your cultural background': Key tips for foreign job hunters in Sweden

One international worker who found it hard to land her first job in Sweden is Amanda Herzog, who eventually founded Intertalents in Sweden with the aim of helping other immigrants find work in the country.

Herzog originally came to Sweden to study at Jönköping University and decided to stay after graduating.

“I thought it would take three months, maybe six months to find a job, I was prepared for that,” she told The Local during a live recording of our Sweden in Focus podcast held as part of Talent Talks, an afternoon of discussions at the Stockholm Business Region offices on how to attract and retain foreign workers in Sweden.

“What happened was it took over 13 months and 800 applications to actually get a job in my industry, within marketing.”

During this time, Herzog was getting multiple interviews a month, but was not getting any further in the process, despite showing her CV to Swedish recruiters for feedback.

“They were baffled as well,” she said. “By the time I landed my dream job, I had to go outside of the typical advice and experiment, and figure out how I actually can get hired. By the time I got hired, I realised what actually works isn’t really being taught.”

‘Reassess your cultural background’

Often, those who come to Herzog for help have sent out hundreds of CVs and are unsure what their next steps should be.

“My first piece of advice is to stop for a second,” she said. “Reassess your cultural background and how it fits into Sweden.”

Herzog, for example, discovered she was interviewing in “the American way”.

In the US, when asked to tell an interviewer about yourself, you’d be expected to discuss your career history – how many people have you managed? Did sales improve while you were working there? – while Swedes are more likely to want to know about you as a person and why you want to work in a specific role for their company in particular.

“A lot of people don’t know this, so imagine all of the other cultural things that they’re doing differently that they learned in their country is normal,” Herzog adds.

“Just start with learning, because it could be that you don’t need to change very much, you are qualified, you just need to connect with the Swedish way of doing things.”

 
 
 
 
 
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Networking is important

“Don’t hesitate to reach out for help and guidance,” said Laureline Vallée, an environmental engineer from France who recently found a job in Sweden after moving here nine months ago with her partner, who got a job as a postdoc at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

“You tend to insulate yourself and consider yourself not capable, but you’re not less capable than you were in your home country, you just need to explain it to the employers.”

Another tip is to network as much as you can, Vallée said.

“Networking is really important here in Sweden, so just go for it, connect with people in the same field.”

This could be through networks like Stockholm Akademiska Forum’s Dual Career Network, which helps the accompanying partners or spouses of foreign workers find a job in Sweden, or through other connections, like neighbours, friends, or people you meet through hobbies, for example.

Make a clear profile for yourself

Another common issue is that applicants are not presenting themselves clearly to recruiters, Stockholm Akademiska Forum’s CEO, Maria Fogelström Kylberg, told The Local.

“If you’re sending 600 applications without an answer, something is wrong. We have seen many people looking for jobs working in a supermarket, and the next application is a managing director post,” she said. “You have to decide ‘who am I? What do I want to do?’, you have to profile yourself in a clear way.”

This could be editing down your CV so you’re not rejected for being overqualified, or just thinking more closely about how you present yourself to a prospective employer.

“Which of my skills are transferable? How can I be of use to this company? Not what they can do for me, but what problem can I solve with my competence?”

Job hunters should also not be afraid of applying for a job which lists Swedish as a requirement in the job description, Fogelström Kylberg said.

“Sometimes if I see an ad for a job and I have a perfect candidate in front of me, I call the company and say ‘I have a perfect candidate, but you need them to speak Swedish’, they then say ‘no, that’s not so important’. This is not so unusual at all so don’t be afraid of calling them to say ‘do I really need perfect Swedish?’”

Listen to the full interview with Maria Fogelström Kylberg, Amanda Herzog and Laureline Vallée in The Local’s Sweden in Focus Extra podcast for Membership+ subscribers.

Interview by Paul O’Mahony, article by Becky Waterton

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