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Business group says Denmark needs more foreign labour if country ups military service

The effect on the Danish labour market must be considered if the government goes through with a plan to extend military service, according to the Confederation of Danish Industry (DI).

Published: 15 March 2024 13:41 CET
Business group says Denmark needs more foreign labour if country ups military service
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen meets soldiers serving Danish military service, March 7th 2024. The government wants to increase military service but a major business group says this would create a labour supply shortage. Photo: Mikkel Berg Pedersen/Ritzau Scanpix

Earlier this week, the government said that, as part of a plan for ramped-up military spending, it wants to extend military service to 11 months and call up women as well as men.

The Confederation of Danish Industry (DI) says this would impact the amount of labour available to Danish businesses and that foreign labour could be one way to up the shortfall.

The labour pool available to Danish business will shrink by 2,100 due to the higher number of conscripted young Danes under the government plan, DI has calculated.

“We support the Danish military being strengthened. But we are pointing out that it will mean we are short of staff in private businesses,” DI’s head of labour market policy Steen Nielsen told news wire Ritzau.

“It’s therefore very important that the government has a focus on increasing the labour pool. Because there is already a shortage of workers,” he added.

That would include new initiatives to attract labour from abroad, DI has suggested.

The organisation said that a more efficient public sector is another area on which the government could focus.

The government has already set itself a target of increasing the labour supply by 45,000 by the next general election, but the additional conscriptions will mean young Danes begin their civilian careers later, while work to increase military capacity will draw from other sectors, DI said in a statement.

That means “a need to quickly implement several initiatives that strengthen the labour supply,” Nielsen said in the statement

“Here, it is first and foremost important to get more international colleagues to fill vacant positions, under proper employment conditions,” he said.

“And we must ensure an efficient public sector through reforms,” he added.

The government wants to reform the Danish military service system so that women can be called up as well as men. Currently, only men can be asked to fulfil military service.

“A crucial part of strengthening the military is that young Danes become part of our defence. We must therefore have a higher degree of military service,” Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said at a press briefing on Wednesday.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defence said the plan will mean all young Danes “must complete military service on the same terms and will be able to be conscripted”.

The government also wants to extend military service to 11 months from the current basic period of four months, and to increase the total number of conscripts from 4,700 to 5,000.

Meanwhile, investment on increasing the capacity of the Danish military would indirectly affect the amount of labour available in other areas, according to Nielsen.

The opposition of other parties to conscription of women could yet provide an obstacle to the government as it seeks to push through the change.

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WORKING IN DENMARK

How will Denmark’s new rules on recording working hours affect you?

From July this year, all people working in Denmark will have to document any deviations from their agreed working hours. Here's how it's going to work.

Published: 13 May 2024 13:13 CEST
How will Denmark's new rules on recording working hours affect you?

On January 23rd, Denmark’s parliament voted through a law that, among other things, requires all Danish employers to introduce a working hours registration system that makes it possible to measure the daily working hours of each individual employee. 

The requirement, which comes into force on July 1st, implements a 2019 judgement of the EU Court, which stated that all member states needed to bring in laws requiring employers to record how many hours per week each employee is working.

The bill is built on an agreement reached on June 30th last year between the Confederation of Danish Employers, the Danish Trade Union Confederation, and Denmark’s white collar union, the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations. 

Will everyone working in Denmark now need to keep a detailed record of the hours they put in each day? 

No. Workers will only need to register any deviations from the working hours they have already agreed or been scheduled. So long as they stick to their scheduled hours, they never need to open the app, website, or other time registration system their organisation has set up. 

If they have to come in early for an interview, however, or do a bit of preparation for a meeting the next day in the evening, they will be expected to log those extra hours. 

Similarly, if they pop out for a dentist’s appointment, or to get a haircut, those reductions in working hours should all be noted down. 

What do employers need to do? 

All employers need to set up and maintain a detailed record of the actual hours worked by their employees, but the law gives them a lot of flexibility over how to do this, insisting only that the record be “objective, reliable and accessible”. 

They could do it in the old-fashioned way using a shared Excel spreadsheet, or, as most probably will, use an app such as Timetastic from the UK, ConnectTeam from the US, or Denmark’s zTime or Timelog.

To make it easier for their employees, employers can fill their scheduled hours into the time registration system in advance, so that workers only need to make a log of any deviations.  

Under the law, employers are required to keep these records for five years.

Employees empowered to set their own schedule — so called self-organisers — are exempt from the law, but as the law states that such people should be able to reorganise their own working time “in its entirety” and that this power should be enshrined in their contracts, this is only expected to apply to the most senior tier of executives. 

Who will be able to see my working hours? 

Each employee should only have access to their own data, which is covered by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and should not be able to see a detailed record of hours worked by their colleagues. 

Managers, however, will have access to the working hours records made by their subordinates. 

Will the legislation put limits on how many hours I can work? 

Yes, but in theory those hours already are limited for almost all employees by collective bargaining agreements. 

The new rule is intended to make sure that employees do not work more than 48 hours per week on average over a period of four months, the minimum standard under EU law, known as the 48-hour rule.

People in certain professions can, however, work longer than the 48-hours if they are covered by a so-called “opt-out”. 

Won’t it just be an additional hassle? 

The Danish Business Authority, the government agency which is supposed to support businesses in Denmark, estimates that keeping the time registration system up to date will only take between one to three minutes of employees’ time. 

In addition, it estimates that as much as 80 percent of employees in the country already keep a record of their time. 

Henrik Baagøe Fredelykke, a union official at Lego, said in an article on the website of the HK union, that he believed that the records could serve as an “eye-opener” about unrecorded overtime. 

What was crucial, he said, was that the system was used primarily to ensure that there was no systemic deviation from working hours and not to police employees. 

“It must not be used for monitoring by the management, who can come and say ‘whoa, why didn’t you work 7.4 hours yesterday?’,” Fredelykke said.

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