The work that the "lazy danes" refuse to do is mainly jobs like garbage men, painters, constructors etc. When it comes to highly skilled labour however you should assimilate into the work-ethic, I like this comic that jokes around this.

Now, this was back in the 50s-60s, but the fact is that we work less now, the reason is that we're very productive. Some places in Norway even operate on a 30 hour work-week, the result was increased productivity and the sickness went down from 11% to 6.6%. A real problem however is that in Denmark, people look down on garbage men and the like.

About the poverty increasing, I talked about the beggars in a different post. Summed up, the beggars are illegal immigrants for the most part, and therefore they have no right to cash support from the welfare. Sadly we have stories like this one where a lady got scammed for 29 000NOK. A solution to this is to give money to the shelters rather than to the beggars, one example given was that a romanian beggar makes enough to live here and send home the equivalent of a romanian monthly median wage every month.

As for poverty itself, we define the limit as 50% of the median wage. Which for people who live alone under 45 is ~16500 USD after taxes, and for a couple with a kid 7-17 years old ~50500USD. The problem is people where only a single parent is working, because then you are considered poor very quickly. The amount of poverty has in total decreased since 1990, but the amount of poor young adults has increased, due to people dropping out of school and getting low-skill low-wage jobs. Even those however pay very well after a few years, but people tend to not stick around working the same job for years. Mentally ill and drug users also bring up the poverty numbers, since they rarely work 100%.