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In Romania, in the recent years, privatization, economic restructuring, diversifying and business modernization were not accompanied by a special policy on job quality improvement or on improving/modernising working conditions. There is a general legislative framework providing a threshold for working conditions, but a lot of jobs and occupational groups are exposed to multiple vulnerabilities, i.e. about 10% of the employees working more than 8 hours a day. In contrast with economic restructuring efforts, foreign direct investments and high technology transfers, employment quality have not changed substantially, in some cases the vulnerability level being even higher. The main contribution of our paper is to identify the most vulnerable occupations in Romania by using the available national indicators. Using Principal Component Analysis, we identify two main sources of vulnerability in employment: one related to working time and the other employment's attributes i.e. the level of earnings and contract type (part time or full time). The correlations of these variables allowed us to identify the main occupations with multiple sources of vulnerability - ISCO5, ISCO 6 and ISCO 7 - appear to be the most vulnerable in terms of working time and earnings in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free Movement of people is a fundamental principle of the European Union (EU). In a context of strong divergence in employment and working conditions among EU member states, migration can be seen as a way to increase employment opportunities but also to escape from poor working conditions at home. In this article, we focus on the possible influence of employment vulnerability by comparing its individual level among migrants and native workers in EU countries. We implement propensity score matching methods using data from the European Social Survey (2008) and indexes of employment vulnerability proposed by Bazillier et al. (2014). Overall, we show that migrants face the same level of employment vulnerability than natives, all other things being equal. But there are strong differences by skill-level. Low-skilled migrants have a lower level of vulnerability mainly because of a lower level ofemployervulnerability while high-skilled migrants face a higher level of vulnerability, because of a higher level ofjobvulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Romanian labor market has faced over time with an irregular transition, resulting in an increase of labor shortages. One reason for this phenomenon is the increase of emigration. This paper aims to identify: the employee profile, for those who would like to migrate for work abroad; the preferred emigration ways for employees, and the characteristics of employees who would like to work abroad for higher earnings. Therefore a survey of SME employees in urban areas of the country is developed with the support of the Romanian Institute of Public Opinion Survey (IRSOP Market Research & Consulting). The survey respondents were asked about their opinion on the major problems facing the Romanian labor market: discrimination, external migration and undeclared work. Survey results show that potential migrants’ profile in Romania is similar to that of European migrant: male individuals with low education, young and without experience. The analysis revealed a significant influence of the regional factor on migration. The authors mentioned some social and economic measures needed to be implemented to reduce Romanian external migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian economy's transition process began suddenly and was accompanied by disintegration of former political and economic system. In terms of GDP per capita, Romania has been one of the poorest countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Also, the Romanian economy was one of the most agrarian economies in Europe. Completely isolated from the informational point of view, Romania had a fully centralized economic system. Beginning of transition was completely chaotic, especially because of the complexity of integrating the fundamentals of democracy and market economy. Internal problems, instability, political corruption or lack of appropriate reforms have led to a difficult restructuring and privatization process. In this paper we present and analyze the tendencies and vulnerabilities on Romanian labor market between 19991 and 2009 versus EU member states. There were identified three shocks with major social impact on Romanian economy: the revolution in December 1989; the EU accession in January 2007 and the world economic crisis began in 2007. These three structural shocks have deeply influenced and still do the evolution of Romanian labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]