Emphasis on Materialism Blamed for ‘New Poverty’ : Denmark’s Welfare Safety Net Is Failing

Istegade in the heart of Copenhagen has become a mean street of narcotics, child prostitution, alcoholism, pornography and violence--a Skid Row for those falling through the safety net of Denmark’s generous welfare state.

Social workers say many of the people on Skid Row are under-40, middle-class victims of a “new poverty” that has developed within Danish welfarism because of what they call its emphasis on materialism over quality of life.

Danes pay an average of 50%--and sometimes as much as 68%--of their incomes into one of the world’s broadest welfare programs to finance free health services, schooling, old-age care and even burial costs. Unemployment benefits--90% of a person’s last paycheck--can reach the equivalent of $1,200 monthly.

But many of those on Istegade and other Skid Rows have never worked and are not likely to.

“There is a new class division in society--those who have jobs and those who don’t,” says one of the social workers, Georg Herman, who runs an emergency aid service from the Mariekirken Lutheran church.

The church is about halfway up Istegade’s strip of all-night bars, red-light hotels, derelict buildings, junkie hangouts and sex shops. At noon the church opens its doors and the night’s casualties file in.

Avoid Authorities

Most of the addicts, prostitutes, winos and bag ladies want to stay beyond the reach of official welfare agencies, and they know that here they can get some money or medical treatment without having to register with the authorities.

Herman, with the help of a minister, another social worker and 35 volunteers, deals with as many as 900 people a year. He works closely with the Danish Salvation Army and the Lutheran state church.

The church serves as headquarters and lends its name to a national program called Marietjensten (Mary’s Service), which primarily is a referral service for helping the homeless and hungry. It also helps provide family counseling, drug rehabilitation or simply a warm place on a cold night.

In Christianshavn, another tough quarter of Copenhagen, Jens Aage Bjoerkeoe heads a rehabilitation center that operates on the self-help principle. People coming off the streets are given work to do in exchange for three daily meals.

Bjoerkeoe echoes many other social workers when he maintains that Denmark’s “new poverty” goes deeper than purely material needs.

“The price of our material welfare is that we have made each other weaker and poorer in many areas,” he said.

“No one has to starve to death in today’s Denmark. . . . The new social problems have to do with an impoverished quality of life.”

Predictions are that the nation’s current 8% unemployment rate will rise.

“If we fail to carry out major social reforms and alter our social policies, we could end up in an absurd situation where a third of the population produces goods and services, another third are social workers and the last third are welfare cases and pensioners,” Bjoerkeoe said.

Death Rate Climbing

Prime Minister Poul Schlueter, a conservative, recognized the “new poverty” in his New Year’s address but said it was a social problem to be dealt with in the future. He said it involved a few hundred thousand of Denmark’s 5.1 million people--a disadvantaged minority in a country with the highest annual per-capita income in Western Europe.

At the Mariekirken church, Herman said that those coming in from the Istegade are younger than before and that the death rate among them is climbing.

“I can’t understand how Denmark, a country whose only natural resource is its people, can allow so many of its young to perish,” he said.

“We take as much time as it takes to help our clients. About all we can do is make the days they have left as comfortable as possible.”