The reform includes newly tightened residence and employment requirements to receive more than the lowest tier of benefits, a Kafkaesque hurdle demanding nine years of residence and two-and-a-half years of full-time work within the past decade. Previously reserved for those arriving after 2008, now, in a generous display of equal-opportunity cruelty, this barrier has been generously extended to all benefit claimants. Mette Louise Brix, a social worker and union coordinator in the municipal job centre in Gribskov, puts it starkly: “There are citizens whose monthly benefit is being halved… Some citizens can see they will have trouble staying in their homes. Others are asking how they are supposed to ensure food for their children.” She adds that this policy also targets people with substance abuse disorders and young people with severe mental illness. “Social workers are worried about what they might do,” she tells.

But Denmark’s benevolence does not stop at mere impoverishment. Those relegated to this basement-level benefit must now prove their “usefulness” through a mandatory 37-hour weekly work obligation. Failure to comply results in sanctions to their already skeletal benefits. This obligation may be fulfilled through Danish language classes, unpaid internships for private employers or through the Orwellianly named “usefulness jobs.” These are not jobs in any meaningful sense but rather penances in the form of unpaid labor for the public sector, such as park maintenance or cleaning public toilets, ritual humiliation designed to deter and discipline rather than to prepare for real employment. The subtext is clear: work will set you free, or at least keep you too busy and broken to complain.

Signe Færch, Chairwoman of the Danish Association of Social Workers, notes the bitter irony: “It is thought-provoking that they talk about de-bureaucratisation and yet introduce new bureaucracy where social workers risk having to control citizens’ commute times, attendance and job seeking efforts. … We know that usefulness jobs rarely lead to lasting employment.” She is concerned that the reform compels social workers to become overseers of “pseudo-work” instead of facilitators of real jobs.

Simultaneously, despite dire warings from 18 humanitarian NGO’s, the reform eliminates a crucial lifeline: the section 34 housing subsidy, until now an indispendable tool in efforts to reduce homelessness. This support was vital for benefit recipients facing high rents in a country experiencing a severe shortage of affordable housing, especially in large cities. Jeanette Bauer, head of the independent humanitarian organisation Danish Church Aid, has warned that scrapping this aid would be a “human catastrophe.” The homeless advocacy organisation SAND was blunter, stating its removal was like “setting a roadblock on the road from shelter to housing” and has stated that it is guaranteed to lead to more homelessness.

The human cost, predicted by experts and NGOs with near-unanimous dread, is stark. People battling addiction, severe mental illness, or simply the crushing weight of systemic disadvantage are deemed insufficiently “useful” or too racially impure to deserve adequate support. They face hunger, eviction, and destitution. Færch summarises the cruel paradox: “Necessities like rent, food, and transport are expensive in Denmark. You cannot live a dignified life on DKK 6,789 before tax… If a citizen is worried about whether they can pay their rent or electricity bill, it is difficult to muster the surplus to write a good CV.” The reform, she concludes, creates “another roadblock” for the most vulnerable.

This Danish experiment in punitive welfare “reform” is not an isolated incident. It resonates with a disturbing transatlantic trend. Across the North Sea, the Starmer regime is pushing for eugenicist cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP), a vital support for disabled people, insinuating that the sick and the disabled are simply malingering. In the US, the Trump regime’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gleefully gutted essential support systems for the most vulnerable. The shared logic is painfully clear: the disabled, the racialised, the poor, those least “productive”, are to be discarded.

Meanwhile, western leaders find no difficulty mustering funds for other priorities. The money that could have gone to help the civilian population are spent on balooning military expenses, with NATO recently planning to raise expenditures to an eye-watering 5% of GDP to fund agressive military buildup. While civilians are ordered to subsist on crumbs and scrub toilets to prove their worth, the Danish regime has embarked on a dangerous path of rearmament fueled by the slogan “spend! spend! spend!”.

Denmark’s sleek Nordic image remains a powerful export, candles, hygge and smiling cyclists. But beyond this curated postcard lies a ruthless machinery of surveillance and social discipline. Under the smooth slogans, one finds that the cruelty is the only point.

Sources:

• Reform sender tusindvis under fattigdomsgrænsen og gør flere hjemløse, Arbejderen, July 1st