Homeless Eastern Europeans cheated by the Employers
05-03-2009

For a number of years  projekt UDENFOR has experienced an increasing number of foreign homeless people in Copenhagen. Using our knowledge from our practical experiences we have focused  on  collection of knowledge about the conditions of the homeless people including especially those of the Eastern Europeans. We do not know much about their situation before the life in the street as rough sleepers and our own possibilities to help them further. For the group of Europeans who have failed in Denmark this also requires an insight into their rights as Europeans in Denmark.

For a long time we have consequently focused on exposing the above-mentioned circumstances and in the autumn of 2008 we succeeded in establishing project cooperation with a couple of students from the international course at Copenhagen College of Social Work. Its goal was to make an inquiry into the condition/situation of the homeless people in Copenhagen.

The inquiry “The Freedom of Mobility for Workers” by Karina Vendrup Andersen and Line Selmer Garbøl carried out in cooperation with projekt UDENFOR  is now finished.

“The Freedom of Mobility for Workers” focuses, as the title suggests, on the increasing group of homeless job-hunters in Copenhagen who end up in homelessness. The report highlights the causes and consequences of this homelessness. It is the first Danish profound, qualitative analysis of the conditions of the Eastern European homeless people in Denmark. The analysis is based upon 9 homeless Eastern Europeans in Copenhagen, 4 interviews with persons who work for and with this group, including observations from 3 homeless shelters in Copenhagen. The report documents how job-seeking Eastern Europeans experience a social comedown after arriving in Copenhagen.

Unfavourable socio-economic conditions in the native countries have made informants go to Denmark in the hunt for jobs. In Copenhagen they have been exposed to working conditions which have made it problematic to obtain legal work.

Cheating on the part of Danish and Polish employers is a recurrent factor in the interviewed persons’ accounts which tell about non-payment or insufficient payment of wages. Poor and unstable working conditions have led to an existence as homeless people for the interviewed persons.

At the same time these persons experience problems with social relations. A homeless life is connected with the use of drugs, violence and burglary. This situation results in a number of intrapersonal consequences for those involved and manifests itself in a hopelessness along with loss of pride and self esteem. This prevents several from returning home, and thus they end up in a deadlock situation in the streets of Copenhagen. Last but not least the exposed situation as a homeless person leaves them few real possibilities to change their situation.

When the possibility of self-support ceases they have no longer a legal basis for staying in the country according to the Danish law or to make use of the public shelters for the homeless people. The shelters which choose to receive the group of inquiry, anyway, have limited means of help. This creates an insecurity in the life situation of the informants, and several are forced to become rough sleepers.

The inquiry shows furthermore that the knowledge of the relief organisations about the group and the rights of the group is of a sporadic nature. Apparently there is a lack of sharing of information among the organisations. Interviews with colleagues in a local framework shows that the focal point in the local social work consists in aid to repatriation which also appears from the local political guidelines. The local social work is often in contrast to the informants’ own wishes to stay in Denmark and getting a stable attachment to the Danish labour market.

The results of the inquiry confirm the experiences of project UDENFOR from its practical work and our supposition that it is going downhill for the foreign homeless people during the period they spend in Denmark as homeless persons. A situation which grows even worse if it develops into a permanent deadlock state of affairs. As we have advocated before, our knowledge and experiences from the street level demand a social responsibility from the political part. Organisations like project UDENFOR already assume a social responsibility and we try to help the group as well as we can but we need our politicians to take responsibility and to meet the challenges

nationally as well as internationally. Finally the challenges call upon a European cooperation on social policy including social assistance. The European Union must across Europe take in hand poverty and expulsion – especially if The EEC wants to put an end to homelessness.

Recently, in the news, it was mentioned that a new wave of Polish workers are on their way to Denmark due to unemployment in Poland. Since the Danish building trade does not prosper, the probability of getting a job in Denmark is not very big. In other words there is no chance of fewer Eastern European ending up in an exposed situation in the street but rather more people than earlier.

Serap Erkan