President Dalia Grybauskaite and King Harald V of Norway attend the official welcoming ceremony at the Royal Palace during Lithuanian state visit to Norway in early April.

Norwegian Aftenposten writes today that craftsmen from Lithuania worked 210 hours for NOK 3400 (EUR 425). – A bad example of social dumping, "says the Norwegian Labour Inspection to the newspaper.

Two craftsmen worked 209.5 hours for NOK 3400 (EUR 425) by the company Norwegian Batilja Service Team (NST) . This equates to an hourly rate of NOK 16 (EUR 2).

Norwegian labour authorities call it "a bad example of social dumping." Legal adviser in the Norwegian Labour Inspectorate, Kjersti Marie Gjerde, says to www.Aftenposten.no that NST already in 2008 were caught in a similar case, a case still pending in the courts.

NST Batilja, which is part of the NST group, took legal action after receiving the Labour’s order in 2008, but lost the case in the Oslo City Court at the end of 2009. The company appealed the case to the High Court.

On its web site writes that the NST Baltija is "a company located in Vilnius, Lithuania, with business units in the rental of workers from Eastern Europe to Scandinavia, as well as activities within the health, care and domestic services."

Managing director Jan Thorstensen in the NST Group tells www.Aftenposten.no that he will not comment.

I have personally heard of several such cases in recent years, and I’m afraid that it is a rather widespread phenomenon that Eastern European craftsmen and workers within other fields are exposed to ‘slave wages’ and degrading working conditions in many Western European countries.

An extensive clean-up should be implemented as soon as possible – in close cooperation between the countries involved.
Aage Myhre
VilNews Editor-in-Chief