On Monday, the Folketing debated the government’s proposed budget for 2027.
During this debate, the Social Democrats’ (Socialdemokratiet) spokesperson on finance, Kaare Dybvad Bek, highlighted a proposal in the budget concerning the international workforce.
This proposal would require companies to pay for employees from “third world countries” to learn Danish before they come to Denmark.
“Underpaid labour from Asia and Africa changes us”
Most of the speech given by Dybvad Bek at the beginning of the debate in the Folketing on the budget revolved around unskilled international labour.
He opened his speech by saying that “for the Social Democrats, it is about the fact that unregulated and underpaid labour from Asia and Africa changes us in at least three ways.
“It changes us as people, it changes our local communities, and it changes our economic model”.
He then compared the use of services such as Wolt to schoolchildren using artificial intelligence, before asking, “How do we become as human beings if we slowly let low-paid Africans and Asians do everything that is not immediately manageable?”
Dybvad Bek went on to describe how large influxes of immigrants from what he describes as “third world countries” impact local communities by stretching public services.
He asked rhetorically, “It might become cheaper for us to go to restaurants and have goods delivered, but what are the consequences for the local communities where new residents settle?”
Underpaid migrants
He also talked about a recent case in which it was revealed that foreign workers from South Asia have been underpaid at a car company in North Zealand.
In this case, the company took large parts of the employees’ salaries and had them living in very poor conditions.
Dybvad Bek noted that this is not fair to the company’s competitors who do not engage in such practices with regard to their employees.
“Sends a clear signal”
In his speech, he noted that the proposed policy “sends a clear signal that people who come to this country to work need to speak Danish”.
He also noted the government’s belief that this would save the Danish state roughly 100 million Danish kroner a year in Danish-language education.
