Denmark Is Breaking down Socially
24-09-2010

The Danish newspaper The Christian Daily has started a series about the exposed people at the bottom of society.

In the first article “Denmark Is Breaking down Socially” the largest church diaconal organizations send out a warning that the holes in the social safety net have now become so big that entire groups of exposed people will be lost whereas the broad middle class are getting better off.

Exposed groups are hit by political tightening, and there are no longer any means of flexibility to look at the single person individually. In stead the exposed people are met by demands for “normalization” on the basis of a standard which to a high degree is labour market related.

- We are dividing society into an A and B team which one would never have imagined could happenwhen the welfare state was created. One might speak of a minor social revolution and the gap to those who do not manage very well gets bigger and bigger. Politically the screw has been tightened enormously and the demand concerning the exposed people says that they must normalize, says Thomas Pedersen who is a communication co-worker at the Kofoeds School in Copenhagen.

He is backed up by among others Bjarne Lenau Henriksen who is the leader of Dan Church Social.

- In the future the question will not only be an A and a B team but an A and a Z team because the difference is so big between the biggest and the strongest in the society. The social politics build on a negative human vision where everybody with a problem is sent to the job centre. When we talk about social politics today it is in reality employment politics. It seems that work is the cure for both poverty, verrucas and incontinence, says Bjarne Lenau Henriksen.

Inger Støjberg, Minister of Employment, thinks that the best social politics are precisely employment politics.

- We are definitely not creating an A and a Z team. The best we can do for people outside the labour market is to get them inside the labour market where they meet colleagues and expectations. I think it is a poor country which tells a socially exposed person that the only offer we can give is a socially shut-up sweet in the form of a pay check every single month, says Inger Støjbjerg who, however, admits that the employment system is too bureaucratic.

- Undoubtedly it can and must be done more simply. We must get rid of all the nonsense. We are working to solve this problem.