Policy Proposal on informal employment
Policy Proposal on informal employment
Proposed policy solution: Introduce a risk-based joint enforcement model using the VIVE social-dumping index as the main tool to target firms employing foreign workers, supplemented by labour clauses in state contracts.
Problem
Problem
Denmark has strong labour-market regulation and high formalisation, yet informal and exploitative employment of migrant workers persists in construction and demolition. Migrant workers make up around thirteen percent of the construction workforce but thirty-seven percent of fatal accidents. Case studies describe workers living on sites, working sixty to eighty hours per week and in some cases paying back part of their wages in cash, leaving them without real access to Danish wage levels, social protection or effective voice. These practices create a parallel "B-labour market," where labour standards are undercut, compliant firms face unfair competition, and risks of labour-market crime rise. Because they occur in weakly organised segments with opaque subcontracting, they cannot be handled by collective bargaining alone and require targeted public enforcement.