Description of the situation

The employment for Roma people is quite complicated in France.

 

The legislative acts of 2012 tried to make it easier. The conditions to access employment were simplified and a list of jobs was enlarged from 29 to 150.

 

But there is still a problem: Roma people are insufficiently trained and a lot of them abandoned school prematurely in their country of origin.

They don’t speak French very well, or not at all, and they don’t have the knowledge about the network of employment in France or they just don't attend a job because they are discriminated from the beginning.

 

Between the very few who are employed, the main fields of work for them are construction and catering, which require no diploma or other knowledge.

 

Moreover, the construction is one of the fields where they have a lot of competences as it is one of their traditional crafts.

 

Another reason is that the jobs in these fields are avoided by the French because of the difficulty of the tasks, the small salary and because they find it dangerous, unhealthy or unworthy. Another job for the Roma in France is selling newspapers or flowers on the street.

 

Regarding a comparative study realized by FRA and the PNUD, in France, only one in ten Roma, between 25 and 64 years of age, declare to have a paid employment.

 

 

The Roma people in France are not seen as other immigrants with few opportunities, but instead they are very often associated with theft, prostitution networks and the traffic of organs. Among these charges, some were made last year by the Ministry of the Interior (Home Secretary).

 

Their arguments were supported by some testimony of the police in Paris, in spite of a lot of examples of good integration.

 

References:

VINCENT E., 2012, L'exécutif assouplit les conditions d'accès au marché du travail pour les Roms, Le Monde.

 

Reding, V., Hahn, J., L. Andor, 2012. The situation of Roma in 11 EU Member States results in brief surveys. investigation report, European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), UNDP, 2012, 36p.