Forgotten Gold
Who is being overlooked in Denmark
Lyndsay Jensen coined the term Forgotten Gold and it caught fire last year on social media. That is to say: the phenomenon of talented people being overlooked in the Danish labour market, usually because of an international connection (such as they are foreign nationals, spent more than a year out of Denmark, their education is from another country etc), is well known in ‘expat’ and ‘repat’ circles. How could it not be? It is so widespread that everyone in these circles knows someone going through it.
Denmark is not the sort of country where one income is enough. It's such a problem that the last handful of reports about retaining foreigners have name checked the issue. Spouses need jobs. Spouses need jobs. ‘International arbejdskraft1’ leave if their partner can't get a job.
Funnily enough it you leave your immigrant bubble, and talk to people who perhaps don't know (m)any foreigners, they are unaware how big the problem is. I chatted to policymakers and leaders at the national summit on workforce in Ringkøbing last month, and not everyone knew. Even in the international workshop.
The reason we don't know the scale of the problem is simple: we don't track it so every report about it is an approximation.
The reason we don't track it? Search me. Technical difficulties? Inertia?
Having more people in your potential workforce who don't show up in unemployment stats makes your unemployment rate look AMAZING so maybe there is motivated inertia there.
Start to count it and a metric that a great many people care about will change significantly. Or maybe it is just one of those things where the decision makers don't know what they don't know.
There are three recent papers I want to bring to your attention today.
Copenhagen Kommunes key numbers report from April/May this year which I have praised to high heaven on here before.
Dansk Industris accompanying spouse report from August this year
Rockwool’s paper from this month on potential workforce.
In KKs report they bought microdata from DST to model the couples involved. They expressed their findings as a percentage. In 2022, in the capital region, just under a half of the new people who came to work brought a partner. In the regions, just over a third.
They wanted to get exclude roommates and other non romantically entangled adults in the house so they modelled partners as those in hetero relationships with an age gap of less than 15 years. Is that a huge undercount or trivial? No idea.
In DIs report, they also bought microdata from DST and they found there were 19500 accompanying spouses in 2023. 11k from outside the EU, 8k from the EU. They even found how many had at least one hours work in December 2023 to classify them as employed or not.
They modelled partners as those who were legally married.
This was fine for the non-EU numbers if you cross reference with the Ministry of Employment’s numbers 5k with jobs according to DI, 5k with jobs according to STAR. But there are significantly fewer people in total (8k) by DI’s count, compared with the 11 k ‘EU dependents’ with jobs according to STAR. Uhoh. They can't all be adult children dependents. So how many are here and out of work? No idea.
Then there's Rockwool's report. They look at the contribution of people who would have been retirement age a few years ago and foreigners and find that these groups are working so much that it is compensating for the demographic challenges of having fewer Danish people in prime working age.
They also say that having more people in the workforce who don't show up on unemployment stats makes unemployment look better than it is. They didn’t make a joke about wearing high heels to make your BMI better like I did a few posts ago but I appreciated it nevertheless. And they also say ‘hey if you wanna limit immigration maybe you could see if any of the foreigners already here could work, just a thought’ and they find there are 89k more people who didn't come here for work or under EU rules (so refugees and non EU spouses lumped together), since 2008. The EU spouses are lumped in with students and EU workers so we don’t have a number from on them. It’s an interesting report though. Go and read it immediately.
My two previous attempts to guess the population size of out of work spouses was stymied by the lack of precision in data for non EU. For EU I thought maybe 30-40 k ? Though that number will have got tangled up with other groups because I don't have the cash to pony up for microdata to be analysed for me.
So. We're triangulating on the number. It's in the tens of thousands. It includes married and unmarried people. It includes gays and straights. There are tens of thousands of people who are outside the Danish labour market.
We should know exactly how many. We should know how many are qualified for the jobs available. We should know how many are job seeking. How many are underemployed and don't want to be. How useful are CV workshops actually in getting them into good jobs?
What a relief that serious business researchers are releasing serious business reports this year trying to quantify the issue. It is time for a full accounting of this issue.
The gains are extraordinary: it starts to solve the labour recruitment issue at no extra cost. It makes medium term retention rates jump from under 50% to 60%. It relieves pressure on housing if two foreign workers live at the same address. It is a problem that deserves serious, evidence based solutions.
Ok, yeah, this is probably a Special Interest by now.
Politicians know full well they made indvandrere and udlændinge into dirty words so they have resorted to ‘international workforce’ now that they mean all kinds of workers so ‘højtuddannede’ doesn't fit the bill anymore. I guess if you find that you need foreigners, maybe you shouldn’t vilify them so much, little life hack for you.
Although living standards here may be somewhat declining, Canada is still a culture of relative comfort. Perhaps that’s why I've long noticed how the general work ethic practiced by new immigrants and migrants is commendable, perhaps even exceptional.
This also applies to their employment with the produce harvesting sector. And there, the jobseeker likely also finds that big business greed insatiably always seeks the cheapest labor possible and migrants are an expedient means to this goal.
Nevertheless, it’s back-breaking work that almost all second and third (etcetera) generation Westerners won’t tolerate for themselves, myself included. I can truly imagine such laborers being more productive than their born-and-reared-here counterparts.
I’m not implying that a strong work ethic is a trait racially genetically inherited by one generation from a preceding generation, etcetera. Rather, it’s an admirable culturally determined factor, though also in large part motivated by the said culture’s internal and surrounding economic and political conditions.
However, I believe that once they’ve resided here for a number of decades, their strong work ethics and higher-than-average productivity, unfortunately, gradually diminishes as these motivated laborers’ descendant generations’ young people become accustomed to the relatively more slackened Western way of life.
One can already witness this effect in such youth getting caught up in much of our overall urban/suburban liberal culture — e.g. attire, lingo, nightlife, as well as work. Indeed, Western ‘values’ assimilation often means the unfortunate acquisition of a distasteful yet strong sense of entitlement.