10 October 2017

Bloomberg: Brexit limbo for EU workers has Denmark Inc. saying ‘come here!’

The Confederation of Danish Industry, which represents about 10,000 corporations, says now is the time to try to attract that demographic to the Scandinavian country and help deal with a severe labor shortage.

“We can use a lot of the EU citizens currently working in the U.K.,” Steen Nielsen, chief of labor policy at the Copenhagen-based confederation, said in a phone interview. “It’s pretty unclear what’s going to happen -- the Brits don’t yet know what rules they’ll apply” to EU workers, he said. [...]

According to Nielsen, Denmark needs to be proactive in its efforts to attract EU workers now caught in the Brexit crosshairs, because many other European countries are grappling with similar labor shortages and will also be making overtures.

“There’s a tussle going on between countries to attract the right workers,” Nielsen said. He says that over the past 12 months, about 40 percent of the confederation’s members have had to abandon their efforts to find the right people to fill vacancies.

“It’s very relevant to look closer at those who don’t know what their future will look like in the U.K.,” he said.

Scandinavian countries such as Denmark are wondering how to find the resources needed to sustain their famed welfare societies. In neighboring Sweden, even a record influx of immigrants has failed to ease a shortage of labor that now threatens to upend the country’s economic growth.

The Danish central bank has long warned of bottlenecks in the labor market. The Economic Council, an independent body which advises the government, says an additional 70,000 new workers from abroad will be needed to maintain an average annual growth rate of 2.1 percent through 2025. “The capacity pressure on the labor market is increasing,” the council said in a report published Oct. 10.

The center-right government of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen is responding with proposed tax cuts to create more incentives for people to join the workforce. (And to be sure, Denmark also wants to curtail EU migrant worker access to its welfare services). [...]

Full article on Bloomberg

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