Do migrant workers influence the overall labour market? Or is the challenge rather to secure the same rights for migrant workers?
Absolutely, very much I would say. At the same time the basic rights of Danish labourers are declining, because of the pressure from foreign workers. We are in a transformational period, I think. It has always been like that, but the fact that we have a new labour market from the eastern bloc countries, where they have severely lower wages, is a challenge we haven't seen before.
For migrant workers in health care and in other public sector areas, where they are employed as public employees, they come to work in totally similar conditions to the Danish workers and that functions fine.
But of course as you know, we have many different kinds of labour workers. I'm mainly talking about Polish labourers. Not so many Estonians, but Lithuanians in agriculture, that's again a whole other story. It seems like the Lithuanians in the countryside get in and are very attractive for farmers, because they are cheaper. A lot of them will begin to settle in and bring their families and then they start to demand the same conditions and wages as the Danish workers. It's an interplay between the work and family situations. You cannot understand that, looking at them just as migrant workers, but it is really import what role their family has – if it is still in the sending country, because then they are only interested in working much more than the Danish workers. But if the family comes with, it is a completely different story.
Find out more
- Labour migration conference 2015: integration of the second and third generations of migrants
- Labour migration conference 2015: impact of the Swedish labour migration law of 2008
- Labour migration conference 2015: immigration as a challenge for the Nordic Welfare Model
- Presentations from the labour migration conference 2015
- Photos
- Nordic-Baltic labour migration and population development project