This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Danish Dispatch.
Denmark has no statutory minimum wage. It has trade unions instead. That works only as long as the people doing the work join them, and a growing share of them don’t. When I moved to Denmark, nobody told me that my salary, my holidays, and my parental leave were not written into law. They are the result of a deal between unions and employers, renewed every few years. Most internationals I meet through Our Voice learn this late, by accident, or not at all.
A bridge held up by its members
That matters more than you would think. The Danish model is not a building that stands on its own: it is a bridge held up by its members, just like our democracy. Every worker who stays outside the unions makes it a little weaker, and today hundreds of thousands of us are standing on it without holding it up.
Union participation in Denmark fell from 79% of employees in 2010 to 69% in 2020, according to Statistics Denmark figures, as reported by The Local. Over the same years, the international workforce kept growing. In February 2024, about 385,000 of Denmark’s roughly 3 million employees were foreign citizens, the highest number ever recorded, as noted by The Copenhagen Post.
Where do many of us work? The labour movement’s own think tank, AE, finds that low-paid internationals are concentrated in agriculture, transport, cleaning, hotels, and restaurants, and construction. These are the sectors where collective agreements reach the fewest workers. In agriculture, only 18% of employed foreign workers pay into an unemployment fund. In hotels and restaurants, it is 24%.
The fastest-growing part of the workforce is the least organised, and it works where protection is already thinnest.
The same pattern at the ballot box
The same pattern shows up at the ballot box. At the municipal elections in November 2025, turnout was 69.2%. Danish citizens voted at 73.4%; foreign citizens at 31.7%. Voters with roots in the newer EU member states had the lowest turnout of any group of countries, at 19.3%. Among those without Danish citizenship it was lower still: only 13.6% of Polish citizens, 12.6% of Bulgarians, and 10.7% of Romanians voted. Italian citizens, my own compatriots, voted at 31.6%, less than half the Danish rate.
Income draws the same line. Voters with a personal income under 100,000 kroner turned out at 57.3%, against 81.8% for those earning over a million. People on kontanthjælp (social security) voted at 33.7%, half the rate of those on no benefits. The researchers stress that income overlaps with age, education, and ties to the labour market, so this is not a pure income effect. But the result for local democracy is the same: those with the least also have the smallest say.
Two maps, one group
Now put the two maps on top of each other. The voters with the lowest turnout, workers from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states, are the same workers AE finds in agriculture, construction, and transport. The turnout report itself links their low participation to the fact that many came here for work and have weaker ties to their municipality. Low pay, low organisation, and low turnout land on the same people.
The two datasets are separate, so I am not claiming that one causes the other. But voting and joining a union work the same way: both are learned from the people around you. In 2025, 18-year-olds whose mother voted turned out at around 85%, against around 30% when she didn’t. The 3F figures below show the same thing for unions, where colleagues and partners make the difference.
For newly arrived Polish workers, union membership and turnout both sit at 12 to 14%. Among Eastern Europeans who settle, both climb to close to 60%, not far from the Danish level. The figures come from different surveys and years, so they show a shared pattern, not a precise match.
Why internationals stay outside
This is not a small group. In 2025, 480,939 foreign citizens had the right to vote, about one voter in ten. Had they voted at the same rate as Danish citizens, around 200,000 more votes would have been cast. Municipal councils decide on daycare, schools, and job centres. Collective agreements decide wages and working hours. A group missing from both rooms has its life decided by others twice.
It is easy to say that internationals simply don’t care. In my experience, the opposite is true: people care a lot, but no one has given them a reason to trust the system or a way into it.
First, nobody explains the deal. Many of us come from countries with a statutory minimum wage, where the law protects you whether or not you join anything. We arrive assuming Denmark works the same way. It doesn’t, and onboarding, relocation packages, and integration programmes rarely say so.
The union and the a-kasse also look like one and the same. New arrivals hear about unemployment insurance and unions in the same breath, often from a salesperson, and cannot tell what each one does. Low-cost cross-sector “yellow” unions fill that gap with cheaper offers, even though they do not negotiate collective agreements.
We also carry our home country’s experience with us. For some, unions are associated with party politics, corruption, or confrontation. For others, they barely existed. Joining something called a “union” can feel like a political statement rather than a normal part of working life.
Then there is fear, especially when your permit depends on your job. IDA has described internationals who hesitate to join because they worry about how their employer will see it. When your residence permit and your family’s stay are tied to one employer, every risk feels bigger. That fear is often misplaced, but it is natural and rational.
Finally, the unions have not been built for us. Meetings, ballots, member magazines, and elected positions are mostly in Danish, for Danes. Outreach often treats internationals as a recruitment target to be informed, not as members who can lead. Unions talk to us, not with us, just as in local, regional, and national politics. People do not join an organisation in which they cannot see themselves, and people do not join a party in which they cannot see themselves.
Three possible futures
Denmark needs foreign labour, and that need is not going away. An ageing population, labour shortages in the trades, care, and the green transition will keep bringing people here for decades. The question is not whether internationals will be part of the Danish labour market in 20 or 30 years. The question is what kind of labour market they will be part of. Looking towards the future, I see three possible futures.
The first is slow erosion. Nothing dramatic happens. Density keeps slipping by a point or so every couple of years. By the mid-2040s, unions represent well under half of private-sector employees, and many of those outside are internationals in hospitality, logistics, agriculture, and cleaning.
The second future is two Denmarks at work, where the erosion becomes a split. Danes, mostly in the public sector and large companies, keep strong agreements, good pensions, and real protection. A parallel workforce of internationals, many on permits tied to their employer, works on individual contracts with minimal pensions and few people to call when something goes wrong.
The third future is renewal. Unions and parties decide that internationals are not a side project but the future of their membership. They build English-language and multilingual tracks into everything, from first contact to elected office. Employers and municipalities treat union and a-kasse information as a standard part of onboarding. Internationals who have been here a few years become shop stewards and recruiters for the next wave.
What must be done
That third future will not happen by itself. It needs four groups to act, and none of them can wait for the others. We, as internationals, have the responsibility to raise the flag and build this new Denmark, together with the Danes.
Unions have to stop translating and start including. That means English-speaking shop stewards, internationals on boards and negotiating teams, and outreach in the places we actually are: workplaces with no union presence, international communities, schools, and language centres. It also means taking on the issues that decide whether we stay, like spouses’ employment, permits tied to one employer, and recognition of qualifications.
Employers that benefit from the Danish model should say so to the people they hire. A neutral, clear explanation of unions and the a-kasse belongs in every onboarding pack, next to the tax card and the CPR number. This, together with voting rights.
The state and municipalities spend serious money attracting international talent. A small part of that should go into explaining how the labour market actually works, in plain language, in the first weeks after arrival, not the first years.
Internationals have to show up too. The model is not something that is done to us or for us. If we want our voice in how we work and live here, we have to join, vote, run for office in our unions, and bring the next person in.
If the unions reach us, Denmark keeps one of the most successful labour market models in the world. If they don’t, and if we don’t reach back, the model will not collapse in a single day. It will just slowly stop being true. The bridge will still be there, but fewer and fewer people will be holding it up.
Simone Giuseppe Uggeri is the founder of Our Voice, a movement of internationals in Denmark.
