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Local Sweden
5 days ago
- Local Sweden
Swedish Migration Agency rates just two jobs as 'high risk' for work permits
The Swedish Migration Agency has rated two job titles – cooks and pantry chefs, and cleaners – as high risk for work permits, saying it doesn't have enough data to include other professions that are also known as being at risk of abuse. Advertisement The agency was requested in February to provide the list of job titles which could be excused a future new salary threshold for work permits, and also asked to propose a list of job titles for which it should not be possible to get work permits, due to the "great risk of exploitation and abuse". Although the cleaning, hotel and restaurant, construction, temping, retail, agricultural, car repair, and personal assistance sectors are all seen as at high risk of abuse, the agency said in its report that "methodological difficulties" meant it lacked sufficient data to back work permit bans for more job titles. "It's only for two job descriptions that we that we have the numbers required to draw any conclusions, and that's then cleaners and also cooks and pantry chefs," Hanna Geurtsen, the official leading the agency's mission to make work permit processing more efficient, told The Local. In its report, the agency said that the inquiry into work permits had already suggested that berry pickers and personal assistants should be ineligible for permits, although it noted that "berry picker" was bundled together with "planter" in SSYK, Sweden's list of 429 job titles. Geurtsen said that the agency had used six criteria to establish which job titles were at risk of abuse or exploitation. Advertisement "We normally talk about sectors in the employment market where we see see a higher risk of exploitation and it's also usually connected to the individual employer. So if an employer has a number of job titles in their factory or restaurant, which of those job titles is most prone to risk here?" she explained. "So to establish any connection at all between 'risk of exploitation' and and job titles, we had to dig quite deep into the data that we have then from processing applications for work permits." She also stressed that there were as yet no guidelines in place on how to balance employers' need for skilled workers and the risk of exploitation, and that the Migration Agency itself lacks a legal mandate to propose that certain job titles be banned from work permits, making the list of two – or four if including berry pickers and personal assistants – job titles purely advisory. "The work on the assignment has been associated with several challenges linked to concepts that are not accepted in the Swedish labour market," the report reads. "A large part of the work has therefore been to develop and describe the method and analysis." The agency based its list on the 152 job titles provided to it by the Swedish Public Employment Service on May 30th, which as The Local reported last week included all those paying below the median salary where employers were struggling to recruit nationally. Of those, the Migration Agency reported that Swedish employers had only recruited internationally over the past few years for about 90 job titles. It opted, however, not to slim the list down to 90 titles on the grounds that employers should not be limited in how they can recruit in future from which job titles they have recruited for in the past. Advertisement "It would be unwise not to exempt a job title from a heightened salary threshold just because in the past, there have not been any applications within that field," Geurtsen said. "We want to encourage employers to explore this way of finding the competence that they need to expand and to grow."
Local Sweden
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Local Sweden
Swedish Migration Agency to publish work permit salary limit exemptions
Sweden's Migration Agency will next week publish a list of the jobs which could potentially be exempted from a new salary threshold for work permits, but it stresses that there's little chance of these exemptions coming into force any time soon. Advertisement According to Hanna Geurtsen, deputy head of the Migration Agency's new work permit "special focus area", the list will be based on another list of 152 job titles provided in a memo to the agency from the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen) on June 1st. "We will have a list, but it will not be 'the list of exemptions'," Geurtsen stressed. "It will instead be part of the underlying information and reasoning that the government needs to take into consideration if they want to proceed with this proposal." The list is set to be published by the end of next week, well ahead of the August 1st deadline given by Sweden's then labour and integration minister, Mats Persson, when he requested it in February. In the press release announcing the order, he said that "opportunities for exceptions for professions where there is a shortage" were "of great importance". The Migration Agency has taken the Arbetsförmedlingen list of 152 job titles and then noted down which job titles have in the past been taken by foreign workers in significant numbers; which, such as the police or the military, require Swedish citizenship; and which have in the past been abused by employers or subject to workforce exploitation. Advertisement Arbetsförmedlingen's list in turn whittled down the 429 job titles listed in the Swedish Standard Classification of Occupations (SSYK) system which both pay less than Sweden's median salary and for which employers also have problems recruiting from within Sweden. Geurtsen stressed that because the government had yet to propose the legislation for a future work permit salary threshold with exceptions, the list presented next week could only be advisory. Since a government inquiry into the salary threshold and exemptions was published in February 2024, with consultation responses received in April 2024, the government has for more than a year delayed taking the next step, which would be to submit a draft bill to the Council of Legislation. This means that the date the inquiry envisaged for the higher salary requirement (at least 100 percent of the median salary) and possible exceptions – June 1st – passed without even a draft bill published, let alone one submitted to and voted through by parliament. "What's important to understand here is that there is currently no legislation which would regulate a salary requirement," Geurtsen told The Local. "This list cannot come into force. It doesn't have any legal status until they tell us how they want to legislate. They also need to decide who in the future will have the mandate to decide on the list. We don't have that mandate." In particular, she said, it's important to understand that the exceptions cannot be applied to the current salary threshold, which is set at 80 percent of the median salary, as this is based on different legislation, the försörjningskrav, which concerns the amount the government judges people need to earn to live comfortably. Alongside the list, the Migration Agency will also explain why the order it was given in February has been challenging to fulfil. "Our press release will stress the fact that this task was difficult to execute due to lack of general definitions and a lack of methodology," Geurtsen said. Advertisement The request, she noted, had given no guidance on how to judge what "risk of abuse or workplace exploitation" would be enough to bar a job title from having an exception. Another complication was that Arbetsförmedlingen was asked to provide its list by June 1st, and the median salary was then updated on June 17th. This meant that the list it provided was out of date only 16 days after it was passed to the Migration Agency.
