18 / 121
16
Discrimination and the Roma community, 2015
2. Discrimination in access to employment:
focus on young Roma
The report sheds light on the serious problem of dis-
crimination in respect of employment as it not only vi-
olates the right to equality but also infringes another
basic social right, employment, which is vital for the
social advancement of the Roma community.
The inclusion of Roma youth in our society is severe-
ly hindered by this important barrier. Our employment
services often hear comments from companies such as
“We don’t want any Gypsies in our business because
we would have all their relatives hanging around our
shop and they would scare away the customers”
;
“em-
ployers don’t want Gypsies in their companies. Not long
ago I had two of them working for me and I had a bad
experience”; “It’s always the same story with those peo-
ple”
;
“The company doesn’t want Gypsies”
, etc. It is at-
titudes like these that prevent Roma from being called
for a job interview, from being hired or from getting an
internship.
One of the measures suggested by our government
officials to boost recruitment and training of our youth
is the Entrepreneurship and Employment Strategy Tar-
geting Young People approved by the Ministry of Em-
ployment and Social Security in February 2013 which
encourages training contracts. But, what if young Roma
are excluded from these measures due to their ethnic
group? In the cases recorded, we have examples of re-
fusal to give Roma an opportunity. In our labour market
integration programme called Acceder, our workers
have found that some companies simply do not want
Roma interning at their companies.
This shows that young Roma have an added hurdle to
overcome if they want to take advantage of the meas-
ures devised by our government to encourage the la-
bour market integration of young people, i.e. rejection
and discrimination based on their ethnic background.
Therefore, we need to raise the awareness of the business sector and step up the inspection
of discriminatory practices in the workplace limiting access to employment. This shows
that discriminatory attitudes have a direct effect on the lives of people as they can be a
major barrier to gaining access to decent employment.