// Social performance in Veidekke

The composition of the workforce

At the end of the year, Veidekke had 6,244 employees – 1,063 in Sweden, 558 in Denmark and 4,623 in Norway. Craftsmen and salaried staff are fairly evenly shared in Sweden and Denmark, while there is a majority of craftsmen in Norway (see table below). In the course of 2008, Veidekke hired 550 new employees in the Group as a whole. Experience from previous recessions has shown that the industry risks losing valuable competence if we stop hiring people, and in the long run, this could mean a setback of several years. At the beginning of the 1990s, recruitment came to a halt, and as a consequence, Veidekke missed five years' worth of newly educated building engineers. It took almost ten years for the Group to re-establish a satisfactory level of competence, and we are not about to make the same mistake again. Therefore, we plan to hire 20-25 engineer trainees and approx. 180 apprentices in 2009.

Aiming to recruit more women

The building and construction industry has traditionally been extremely male-dominated, especially among craftsmen. There is a somewhat better distribution among our salaried employees where around a fourth of our employees are women (see table below). These figures correspond well with previous surveys conducted in the industry. A survey undertaken by the Norwegian research foundation FAFO in 2006, showed that only 13 per cent of employees in managerial positions within building and construction were women, whereas the share of women in administrative positions was around 25 per cent. We will therefore continue to focus on encouraging more women to choose a career in our industry, among other things, through an agreement with the Swedish star athlete Carolina Klüft, whom we hope will help motivate more young women to apply for jobs with us.

Calling for greater flexibility in the rules for lay-offs

The construction industry is very sensitive to fluctuations in the economic situation. When there is a downward trend in the market, workforce reductions or lay-offs may sometimes be necessary. The rules for lay-offs in Norway have been inexpedient and far too rigid. In previous times of crisis, this has contributed to loss of key competence for the industry as a whole, and in the long run, this may have considerable socio-economic consequences. When the market recovers and the industry experiences a growing need for capacity, we may find that persons with key competence have moved on to other industries – and this could mean a setback of several years for the building and construction industry. This is why Veidekke, in December 2008, sent a letter to the Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion, Dag Terje Andersen, in which we call for greater flexibility in the rules for lay-offs. The initiative was undertaken in close cooperation with the employee representatives in Veidekke. We suggested that the number of days for which the company has to pay wages to the employees should be reduced, and even more importantly, that it should be possible to rotate employees within a given number of lay-off weeks. The Norwegian government’s package of measures which was made public in February 2009, included precisely such an improvement of the lay-off rules.