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Seminar Report: Employment Protection in Norway – How It Works


By admin - Posted on 21 November 2016

The second CCI seminar was held on 15th November 2016 at Litteraturhuset. The topic of the seminar was about the Norwegian Working Environment Act (Arbeidsmiljøloven) with the title: Employment protection in Norway – how it works? It was a part of the CCI project in 2016, supported by The Directorate of Integration and Diversity (IMDi) and managed by CPN.

Despite it was a cold Tuesday evening, there were still 50 people gathered at the seminar. In addition to pre-registered 47 participants, 7 more persons dropped in. Most of the participants were immigrants. The ethnic background of the participants spread over 17 different countries.

The seminar was opened by the Vice president of CPN, Dr. Xinli Wang with a short introduction of CCI and CPN. After a success seminar for CCI last year, the lawyer Tron Dalheim from Arntzen de Besche was invited again to give a presentation about the Norwegian employment law. This time, he focused on legislations related to the topics of recruiting employees, employment contracts, temporary and permanent employment, discrimination, and termination of employment. He explained the legislations with interesting cases and examples. Due to low oil price and economic crisis in Norwegian industries, many companies have carried out workforce cuts. Immigrants are in the most vulnerable groups in such situation. During the seminar, the participants were so engaged with the topics that Tron’s presentation was frequently interrupted by questions. At last, Harald Stavn from NITO Telenor talked about Trade Union’s rolls in the employment protection and how it worked in Norwegian companies. He indicated that union’s representatives had meeting places with leaders in different levels of Norwegian companies. Trade unions’ main tasks are to negotiate good agreements on the company level, offer personal and legal supports to members and ensure a fair process regarding seniority, competence and social conditions in case of company downsizing and workforce reduction.

We got very good feedback after the seminar. Many participants expressed their hope for more such seminars in future.

The presentations from Tron Dalheim and Harald Stavn can be found here:

The photos of the seminar taken by Li Li can be found here: http://cpn2003.no/en/node/526