Paper short abstract:

The present paper reviews the segmented labor market, consisting of a primary market and a secondary market (Reich et al.,1973), the dynamic between such markets (Pereira et al.,2015) and the mechanisms upholding and maintaining the informal labour market in the case of Roma ethnics in Romania.

Paper long abstract:

The current paper aim to present the values of labour, conceptualised by the marginalised Roma ethnics from Romania, as it is constructed in the process of occupational integration at the crossroads of the public institutions, social network and individuals. Our research is based on the perspective of the vulnerable Roma individuals, from their standpoint, emphasizing the subjective perspective of everyday life. In our study we employed the feminist method of institutional ethnography by means of the semi-structured interviews, and we studied linkages among local settings of everyday life, institutions, and processes (DeVault and McCoy, 2002). Empirically, the study starts out by mapping the work and activities of everyday life that speak about the (lack of) opportunities of formal employment and the dynamic that tends to keep people stuck in informal labor markets. The conclusions of the present paper try to respond to the question of how do people perceive their precarious employment and how they conceptualise their workplace futures.