Danish conscripts being sent to Greenland will receive an additional allowance of just DKK 14 to 17 ($2.16-$2.62) per day for serving their country.
The recruits are understandably unimpressed.
“We feel like cheap labor,” Carl Emil Alsing Kongsmark, spokesman for conscripts at the Schleswig Regiment of Foot, told Berlingske, according to Sermitsiaq.
The Danish Ministry of Defence says it is reviewing how the deployed conscripts are compensated.
The recruits are not working for DKK 17 a day. The Danish Armed Forces lists their basic monthly pay at DKK 9,034, together with DKK 277 a day in food money. The DKK 14 to 17 is the additional Greenland supplement.
Even so, the difference between what conscripts and professional soldiers receive for serving in the same country is difficult to overlook.
More than 100 conscripts are expected to serve in Greenland for approximately one month as part of the Arctic Endurance exercise. According to the Danish Armed Forces, their activities could include guard duties, winter training and exercises with allied forces.
The timing has produced a remarkable comparison.
Isak Hullert from KNR reported last week that Greenland Energy Company offered local hunters and rotational workers in Ittoqqortoormiit monthly pay of DKK 100,000.
That works out to approximately DKK 3,300, or US$510, per calendar day.
Among the proposed assignments was guarding the company’s remote field site against curious polar bears. Several hunters reportedly rejected the offer because they did not want to feel that they were being bought, although Greenland Energy Company later said it had hired two local hunters.
The contrast was not lost on Greenlandic X poster Kunuk, who offered the conscripts some tongue in cheek career advice.
“One could advise these Danish guys to flee such an army and find work at Greenland Energy Company,” he wrote, before delivering the punchline: “but… it’s unlikely they’ll be hired.”
There is, after all, one important qualification. Greenland Energy Company is trying to hire local Greenlandic workers.
Credit to Kunuk (@freegreensoon) for spotting the comparison and for supplying the morning’s best Greenland punchline.
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