Uncertainty over unemployment insurance benefits (dagpenge) in Denmark could finally be resolved as the commission looking into the issue, Dagpengekommissionen, has handed over its recommendations to the government.
Dagpengekommissionen evaluates that its recommendations would lead to fewer people in the future exhausting their right to dagpenge without weakening employment or the state coffers.
“It hasn’t been an easy task to ransack the over 100-year-old and complicated dagpenge system and produce recommendations for a new system,” said Jørn Neergaard Larsen, the employment minister.
“I’ve noted with pleasure that the commission has agreed that from the outset the dagpenge system will remain a two-year period and the re-earning requirement that the V-K government added in 2010 hasn’t been changed.”
READ MORE: More than 50,000 have now lost their insured unemployment benefits
Off your high horse
But Harald Børsting, the head of the union association LO, did not share the same enthusiasm for the recommendations – particularly the one that enable the unemployed to avoid two qualifying days each quarter if they work at least one week per month during the previous quarter.
So for instance, if they fail to work at least one week per month during one quarter, they will have to wait two days before the next quarter’s benefits kick in.
“We’ve asked ourselves: could it really be correct that workers, the insured unemployed and graduates should be alone in rectifying the crap they did in 2010,” Børsting told DR Nyheder. “We don’t think they should.”
