Too many Danes are moving in and out of unemployment in parallel
with market fluctuations, and one reason is failing employment policies
says the Danish government. Now it has asked an expert committee to
review the country’s entire employment policy.
“We need a thorough review of our entire employment policy. It would
seem something is just plain wrong when we have both jobs to fill and
unemployed people,” Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt (Social
Democrats) said as the review was announced.
Minister for Employment Mette Frederiksen (Social Democrats) agrees
that today’s employment policy is not good enough.
“It needs a fresh start, because for too long it has been running
around in circles. This has led to controls and meaningless activation
programmes rather than real skills improvement and permanent work,”
says Mette Frederiksen.
Denmark’s employment policy costs nearly 6bn danish kroner (€804m) a
year and for the past five years its execution has been in the hands of
94 municipal job centres. It is not the new expert committee’s mandate
to come up with a new organisation model for the employment policy, but
the committee chair, former Minister of Health and Taxation Carsten
Koch (S), does not exclude that the committee might suggest moving the
responsibility for executing policies away from municipalities. The
former centre-right government gave municipalities this power in
2007.
Today each municipality has one job centre, and unemployed people
must go to the one in their own municipality even though many Danes
work outside of their own municipality. Job centres have for many years
been heavily criticised for having badly educated staff and for
spending too much time on administration and documentation and too
little on trying to link unemployed people and businesses.
The criticism has increased in the past year, also from the Minister
for Labour Mette Frederiksen who labelled the situation “a gigantic
systematic failure” which “wastes unemployed people’s time”, and the
Prime Minister has highlighted the fact that some businesses have
completely stopped using job centres to find labour.
The more than 7,000 job centre employees welcome the review. They
say the state’s deregulation of the centres obliges them to spend all
their energy checking whether the unemployed really are available for
the labour market. Municipalities also hope the review will sort out
excessive macro management and red tape. The law regulating job centres
alone is more than 22,000 pages long.
In addition to commissioning the review, the government will also
seek the views of a group made up of trade union representatives, who
welcome the committee’s work as well.
The review will result in two reports. The first will look at the
existing measures for unemployed people who are ready to get back into
work. The second will look at measures aimed at those who are not yet
ready to enter the labour market, i.e. people on cash benefits,
sickness pay, unemployment benefit or rehabilitation. The first report
and the committee’s recommendations are expected this autumn, while the
second report is scheduled for publication in the autumn of 2014,
according to the Ministry of Employment.
