Buying decent work has attracted increased political and academic attention in Denmark, where especially trade unions and centre-left political parties have pushed the agenda for applying labour clauses in public procurement as well as ensure their enforcement. All Danish regional authorities and nine out of ten Danish municipalities apply labour clauses in some of their publicly procured work. They typically use “generic” labour clauses aligned with the ILO-94 convention and typically request suppliers and subcontractors to adhere to wages and working conditions in the most representative collective agreement within the relevant sector. However, the enforcement of the labour clauses appears rather patchy and different public authorities have experimented with novel ways to address the enforcement gaps.

This report is the Danish contribution to the comparative EU funded Procurfair project and through in-depth case studies, the report explores illustrative examples of Danish public authorities experimental enforcement initiatives. Some of the main findings are that the public authorities examined have been fairly successful in implementing these novel enforcement models, but enforcement is costly and requires the building up of expertise in the form of knowledge and best practices. For smaller procuring entities, the cost of this enforcement easily outweighs what seems rational compared with the extent of the procurement made. Thus, making joint enforcement units that can control and enforce on behalf of more than one procuring entity seems like a good way to make resource efficient enforcement.

Other challenges involve the potential clash between regulatory systems, where it is the public procurement entities, not the social partners that are to assess potential violation of the collective agreements, which is in stark contrast to the traditional way of enforcing collective agreements in Denmark. Buying decent work has attracted increased political and academic attention in Denmark, where especially trade unions and centre-left political parties have pushed the agenda for applying labour clauses in public procurement as well as ensure their enforcement. All Danish regional authorities and nine out of ten Danish municipalities apply labour clauses in some of their publicly procured work. They typically use “generic” labour clauses aligned with the ILO-94 convention and typically request suppliers and subcontractors to adhere to wages and working conditions in the most representative collective agreement within the relevant sector. However, the enforcement of the labour clauses appears rather patchy and different public authorities have experimented with novel ways to address the enforcement gaps.