Companies withdraw from cooperation with the exit center

Two companies cease cooperation with the Danish Prison and Probation Service after uncovering working conditions at a deportation center.

Several companies are now withdrawing from their collaboration with the Danish Prison and Probation Service at the Ellebæk Departure Center.

This happens after Information uncovered how detained asylum seekers at the Departure Center Ellebæk work for small money to afford to use the center’s payphone and talk to their family in their home country.

Some of this work has been carried out for private companies through a collaboration with the Danish Prison and Probation Service.

The companies pay the Danish Prison and Probation Service a price per order based on what they would have paid for a similar task in Denmark – for example, calculated based on the industry’s collective agreement.

But because the basic salary for the work must correspond to the work in ordinary Danish prisons, and because those sentenced to deportation must pay half of their salary for their future deportation, the hourly wage can end up as low as six kroner.

Money that is, however, vital for using the departure center’s payphone and being in contact with the outside world.

Danish design company Stelton and Italian water producer San Pellegrino, owned by multinational group Nestlé, have withdrawn from their collaboration.

“We just have to say: Sorry. We did it to the best of our knowledge,” says Jens Beyer, director of Premium Acqua, which is the official distributor of Italian San Pellegrino and French Perrier in Denmark, to Information.

“We just didn’t know that the working conditions were so screwed up at Ellebæk,” he adds.

Stelton’s Danish subcontractor has also had a cooperation agreement with the Danish Prison and Probation Service to assemble components for thermoses with the help of the centre’s inmates. And this comes as a surprise to Stelton’s chairman of the board, Michael Ring.

“We are a proper company, and we want to be proper in our actions all the way through. I was not aware of this. I know that now, and it will stop,” he tells Information.

The combination of a scheme with low pay for paid work and a ban on the internet and mobile phones has met with harsh criticism from Danish and international experts.

ritzau