Even as the unemployment level has soared in recent years, a growing number of unskilled jobs in Denmark are being filled by people from places like Romania, Poland and Thailand, Copenhaga Post reports.
Employers say that the jobs go to the foreigners because Danes simply do not want them and that the nation’s social benefits are so high that it does not pay for Danish workers to take low paying, unskilled position.
In one of the most extreme cases, Ruth’s Hotel in the resort town of Skagen has employed 16 eastern Europeans as housekeepers or dishwashers over the past two weeks. Of the nearly 30 people who applied for the vacant jobs, not one of them was Danish. Peter Christian Jensen, who runs the hotel, said that it is time to face facts.
“Danes do not want or need low-paying jobs anymore,” he told Jylland’s-Posten newspaper.
Some fear that the foreign workers filling unskilled jobs are vulnerable to abuse because of language barriers, lack of knowledge about their rights, limited access to agencies that can help them and inadequate enforcement of employment legislation.
Recent stories about the systematic abuse of Romanians working for cleaning companies, add fuel to that fire
An investigation by Fagbladet 3F revealed that Forenede Service was systematically exploiting Romanian cleaners who were being brought over to Denmark by one of the company’s subcontractors. The Romanians worked long hours with no pay and many lived in squalid conditions in a basement flat owned by a subcontractor to Forenede Service, the nation’s second-largest cleaning company.