Construction company setting up its own foreign employment agency

Foreign workers are a reality, so one company wants to go right to the source

Apr 6, 2015

The Nordic Construction Company (NCC) will set up its own employment agency in Poland this summer to hire skilled Polish construction workers to among other things the company’s construction sites in Denmark.

One of NCC’s main sites is at Amager Bakke in Copenhagen where the company is working on a new incinerator. Currently 80 Polish workers are working at the site. At one point, nearly 200 Polish workers were employed at the site, and as work continues those numbers are sure to rise again.

“If we win a big job tomorrow, we need labor here and now,” Martin Manthorpe, CEO at NCC told DR Nyheder. “If we need 50-200 workers fast, we simply can not find them in Denmark.”

NCC estimates that it could need 500 workers within the next two years.

Fighting social dumping
The company said that on of the objectives of its program is to employ foreign workers without using subcontractors, which in many cases have been involved in cases of social dumping.

There have been cases of Eastern European workers in Denmark working 60 hours a week, six days a week and only being paid for 37 hours, for as little as 55 kroner per hour. NCC was involved in three such cases.

“We learned that there were some foreign contractors and temporary employment agencies, who could not figure out how to handle things and that cost us deary,” said Manthorpe. “We have decided to establish our own temp agency to ensure that everything is done in an orderly and controlled manner.”

Their are currently a record 90,000 Eastern Europeans working in Denmark.