Wage battle for migrant workers in Sweden
STOCKHOLM: Iryna Halubuskaya dusts the furniture of a Stockholm apartment with a constant worry on her mind: Is she making enough money to keep her work visa?
When the 41-year-old arrived in Sweden from Belarus six years ago, her work visa required her to make at least 13,000 kronor (US$1,250) a month in order to stay in the country.
On November 1, the government more than doubled the income requirement for foreigners from outside the European Union, to 27,360 kronor or 80 per cent of the median Swedish wage.
This month, the government announced it wants to raise the level further to 34,200 kronor in 2025, matching the median wage.
Paid hourly, Halubuskaya has had to increase her workload significantly, putting in hours on evenings and weekends.
"I think about my salary all the time," she told AFP.
The coalition government, led by conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and propped up by the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, has pledged to limit migration since coming to power in 2022.
"We want to change the nature of the immigrant workforce... and focus on highly skilled labour", Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told AFP.
She is "convinced that there are people in Sweden who should be able to do" low-paid jobs, whether they are Swedish citizens or people of foreign origin who have come as refugees or asylum seekers.
Stenergard emphasised the high unemployment rate which hit 8.1 percent in January in seasonally-adjusted figures, according to Statistics Sweden.
Jennyfer Aydogdyeva, Halubuskaya's boss, runs a small cleaning business, Stadfen (The Cleaning Fairy), with some 30 employees.
Six of them are affected by the tougher requirement.
Doubled overnight
In order to help her "girls" - most of whom are mothers -stay in Sweden, she is trying to find them more work.
"I didn't think they were going to more than double the income criteria overnight, I didn't think they could do that to a person living here", she said.
According to the Migration Agency, 14,991 work visa holders did not meet the income threshold required to remain in Sweden, after it was raised in November -- with the two most affected sectors being restaurants and cleaning services.
Migrant workers represent a small part of the Swedish labour market. There are some 63,477 migrants with a work visa in the country of 10.4 million inhabitants.
Vladan Lausevic, a member of the association Work Permit Holders, called the government measures discriminatory.
"The centre-right parties in Europe have a history of liberalising labour immigration, but now they're sending a different message to the voters saying 'We have control and we will prevent more people from coming to Sweden'," Lausevic told AFP.
Labour shortage
It is too early to say what impact the income requirement will, according to Andrea Spehar, director of the Centre on Global Migration (CGM) at the University of Gothenburg.
"If you compare Sweden with other countries, labour migration is fairly low," she explained.
"This is above all a reform targeting people of foreign origin" already present in the country.
In Spehar's view, the government wants to encourage employers to recruit people already living in the country rather than third-country nationals who are willing to work for less.
For the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR), the reform does not take into account the already existing shortages in the healthcare sector.
Many municipalities, mainly in the north of the country, are struggling to find "enough nurses, care assistants and other staff", Anders Barane, a senior advisor at SKR, said, explaining that they have until now relied on foreign labour.
The government's move has raised eyebrows in a country where there is no minimum wage -- salary levels are instead negotiated sector by sector and regulated by collective agreements between employers and unions.
Some employers have raised their foreign employees' wages in order to allow them to stay in Sweden.
"This is not the right way to go", Barane said, fearing a "spiral" that would push up the median wage, making it even more difficult for foreign workers to enter the country.
"I pay my employees a salary above what is recommended by the collective agreement, but it's still not enough," Aydogdyeva lamented.