Occupations with Multiple Vulnerabilities in Romania

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.