Active Labour Market Measures for Vulnerable Categories of Population: Domain of Specialisation for Social Workers

Contemporary labour markets are still unequal and discriminatory regarding gender (Fontanella et al., 2020), ethnicity (Schmaus, 2020) and age (Button, 2020). Aiming to reduce these disparities countries developed Active Labour Market Polices (ALMP) that research proves that are more effective supporting vulnerable categories of population. Even if the national expense on ALMP’s in Romania is very low compared to other European countries, the investments from the European Social Fund, both in the previous funding exercise (2007-2013), but also in the present one (2014-2020), favoured the development of projects that aimed the integration into the labour market of vulnerable categories of citizens, making a good opportunity for specialization of social workers in this domain. The present work will analyse, as a case study, the results obtained in such a project, investigating the tendencies vulnerable categories of population have as beneficiaries of active labour market measures, in the context of similar support and economic environment. The purpose is to identify the effectiveness of vocational counselling, trainings and job-search assistance services on three categories of beneficiaries considered vulnerable on the labour market: women, Roma persons and elderly unemployed.


Keywords: active labour market measures, vulnerable categories of population, social work