Jobseekers of the Roma origin seem to have far less of a chance of being invited to a job interview than their non-Roma counterparts with comparable qualifications, brings the SME daily. The daily refers to an experiment carried out by the Finance Ministry's Financial Policy Institute (IFP), in which they responded to a total of 62 job advertisements across Slovakia between July-October.
The Institute sent two similar applications for each job offer, with one involving fictitious jobseekers with a typical Slovak name and the other with typical Roma names. “Considering the inaccessibility of relevant data, it's hard to quantify discrimination; that's why we carried out this simple experiment,” said authors of the project - Libor Melioris and Branislav Zudela from the Finance Ministry's Financial Policy Institute.
The Institute found that while the firms invited some 40 percent of the applicants with Slovak names to interviews, the figure was only 17 percent for the fictitious Roma jobseekers. In addition, only around one-third of the Roma applicants received any form of response from the companies, while 70 percent of the non-Roma jobseekers did at least hear something. Racial prejudice among companies has also been confirmed by Jan Herak of the Home Education Centre in Dunajská Lužná (in the Bratislava region), a facility that helps young adults after they leave children's homes. “It often happens that after they receive a CV they call us to ask whether the young applicant is of a different colour or not,” said Herak, adding that the workers at the centre usually call the potential employers in order to assure them that the applicants are decent and well educated. According to surveys conducted by the Office of the Government Proxy for the Roma Communities, as many as 23 percent of Roma people stated that they had been subjected to discrimination when searching for work. The daily SME further observes that only 15-17 percent of Roma of the working age have a regular job, in comparison to 60 percent of the majority population in the same age group. The Finance Ministry's Financial Policy Institute believes that this can be attributed to inadequate job experience among the Roma, poorer education and prejudice on the part of employers.
