In just a few years, organised crime has become such a big problem in Nordic and Baltic labour markets that increased authority control has become an urgent issue.
With little action, it could undermine the entire Nordic labour market model and law-abiding companies’ ability to compete.
Read this article in Danish on Arbeidsliv i Norden
There was broad agreement on this among representatives for authorities, researchers and the social partners when they met at a Copenhagen conference on 17 September 2026.
It was hosted by the Danish-Faroese Presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers with the aim of exchanging knowledge and experiences of the use of AI, ID cards and improved data as weapons against work-related crime, which often involves migrant workers employed under exploitative conditions.
Money laundering and threats
This is not a fight the social partners can win alone. It must be fought by the authorities in the Nordic countries, underlines Claus Von Elling, chairman of the construction group at the 3F (the United Federation of Danish Workers) and Dansk Byggefag (Danish Construction Unions).
“We see real organised crime in parts of the Danish construction industry, and as long as it is treated as a labour dispute, the organised crime will continue,” Claus Von Elling told the conference.
Money laundering. Threats. Falsified documents. Kickbacks. All this is happening in construction industry companies, he said. The people behind it are impossible to trace, because they use sub-contractors who again use sub-contractors.
At the bottom of this chain you find paperless migrant workers or people employed under conditions that do not reflect reality.
“This is serious criminal activity, and we need authorities and enforcement agencies to put a stop to it,” said Claus Von Elling.
He was backed by his counterpart on the employers’ side, Rasmus Brandt Larssen, industry director at DI Danish Construction, who called the criminals “the enemy” and “parasites”.
“The trade union movement is the businesses’ ally in the fight against this parasite that threatens the entire labour market system. We need to learn more about why criminals find the construction industry so attractive,” said the DI industry director.
3F, Danish Construction Unions and DI established a join trade forum in February 2026 where employers and trade unions can work together to pool knowledge and find common courses of action in the fight against criminals and for proper conditions in the construction industry.
Five kinds of measures
Until a few years ago, the focus in Denmark was primarily on “social dumping” – ensuring that workers from abroad had proper pay and employment conditions.
But the scale and methods of organised crime have changed the agenda, and there is now a need for different terminology, said Synnøve Økland Jahnsen, a sociologist and senior researcher at the Norwegian research institute Fafo, where she researches social dumping and labour market crime.
She described a fluid transition between organised crime, economic crime, labour market crime and social dumping.
“It can be a challenge for the authorities, including the police. Which police unit should actually deal with a case involving crime in the workplace?” said the Norwegian researcher.
Synnøve Økland Jahnsen considers five types of measures to be particularly important for practitioners across the Nordic and Baltic region who are seeking to curb the rise in labour market crime:
- Administrative sanctions
- Shorter supply chains
- Anonymous access to assistance for migrant workers who fear reprisals
- Better protection for migrants who are deported, for example by ensuring they receive wages owed to them by their employer
- Risk-based inspections, including the use of AI to target inspections
The conference speakers broadly agreed that AI could be an important tool for identifying companies where the risk of workplace crime is at its highest and then perform targeted controls of these.
However, limitations to the authorities’ IT systems and data protection regulations throw up considerable barriers for highly targeted use of AI, and there are no easy solutions to this, many of the conference speakers acknowledged.
ID cards gaining ground
Requiring employees to carry valid ID cards is also a weapon used against workplace crime by an increasing number of companies and authorities both in the Nordics and elsewhere in the EU.
NCC is one of the Nordic region’s largest construction companies, and over the past two years it has required everyone with access to NCC’s construction sites to carry a valid ID card stating their employment details.
NCC health and safety manager Charlotte Hougaard Juhl explained to the conference that implementing and checking ID cards is not entirely straightforward, as NCC has many construction sites where workers can come and go without being checked.
But the implementation continues, because NCC considers ID cards to be an important tool in the company’s efforts to monitor who works for the companies that NCC hires to carry out work on its behalf.
NCC also has requirements limiting the number of subcontractors.
When major private and public-sector clients put construction projects out to tender, they are increasingly stipulating that subcontractor chains must be limited to no more than two or three tiers, in an effort to combat social dumping and prevent labour market crime.
Copenhagen Municipality is Denmark’s largest municipality and one of the country’s major purchasers of construction projects.
Since 2011, Copenhagen Municipality has required suppliers to sign clauses covering, among other things, pay and working conditions. In 2025, the municipality also began introducing ID card requirements for main contractors on construction projects.
In time, ID cards will also be mandatory for suppliers in the transport and cleaning sectors, which the municipality also considers to be high-risk sectors when it comes to social dumping and labour market crime.
