Cecilie receives 126 kroner a week in maternity pay as thousands of entrepreneurs risk falling through parental leave system

Thousands of self-employed workers in Denmark who also hold salaried jobs risk being left with almost no maternity or paternity pay due to gaps in the country’s parental leave system, DR reports. On the island of Strynø, Cecilie Beck Gordon is nursing her four-week-old son Alvin in an office chair while working, because she receives just 126 kroner a week in maternity benefit.

Beck Gordon works both as self-employed and occasionally as a salaried employee. Under current rules, maternity pay can only be calculated on the basis of one income source. In her case, that was the profit from her company, which amounts to just under 500 kroner per month.

“It has been extremely shocking to enter the maternity system and see how you can fall between two stools and end up in a fundamentally unjust system where you simply have no rights at all,” she said.

Alliance calls for equal parental rights

In December, 21 organisations from the cultural sector formed the Barselsalliancen, a coalition demanding reform of parental leave rights. The organisation Danske Iværksættere and the trade union Serviceforbundet have now joined the alliance, which is sending an open letter to government negotiators calling for equal parental leave rights to be included in a new government platform.

Peter Kofler, chair of Danske Iværksættere, said Denmark already faces a shortage of entrepreneurs, and particularly female entrepreneurs. After ten years of efforts to increase their numbers, he said structural barriers must now be addressed.

“When you see a woman who has had to choose between business or baby and may receive 250 kroner a week in maternity pay, it blows the entire entrepreneurial development we want completely back to square one,” Kofler said.

He argued that female entrepreneurs are being denied access to rights they fully fund through taxes paid on both their incomes, not just one.

250,000 workers at risk

Anna Ilsøe, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, has researched what she calls “combiners,” people who draw income from multiple sources simultaneously. Her research shows that eight percent of the Danish workforce, approximately 250,000 people, works this way, and the share is growing.

“It is somewhat like saying all redheaded people must pay out of pocket when they go to the emergency room. It would be just as arbitrary, and our welfare society is built on equal and universal rights,” Ilsøe said.

She added that it is critically important that the labour market makes room for combiners, given that Denmark faces future workforce shortages in multiple sectors.

Current rules explained

Under existing rules, the right to maternity pay can only be calculated on the basis of either a salaried job or a business, not both. To qualify through salaried employment, a person must have earned enough in that job, and must be employed on the day parental leave begins or the day before. To qualify through a business, the company must show sufficient profit. Workers who combine the two income types may find that neither source alone meets the threshold, leaving them with minimal or no benefit.

Back on Strynø, Cecilie Beck Gordon says she hopes for a universal minimum benefit that ensures no one falls through the system as she has.

“I would simply wish there was a minimum payment so that no one can fall through the cracks. I find it completely incomprehensible that in Denmark you can fall through in this way,” she said.