Rachel Marangozov and Dirk Gebhardt are MigrationWork consultants on the CONSOLIDATE project, funded by the European Union. Here they reflect on the employment challenges cities in the project face and tools to deal with them.
When peers on the EU-funded CONSOLIDATE project heard this phrase – ‘keeping the human’ at the centre of employment support and design – it instinctively felt like an authentic sentiment expressed by those who we were interviewing at the time. This is what they strived for. This was their starting point. We were in Milan at the time and it rang true amongst us all.
Work is not just a job, an income, a means to support oneself. It affords us dignity, opportunity, and a sense of self-worth as we use and develop our skills and talents. For most, the feeling that we are contributing to society is what gets us out of bed every morning.
For refugees and other newcomers, it’s an opportunity to build a new life. And for many EU countries, with a shrinking workforce, it’s a timely opportunity to realise the potential they already have.
Armed with a benchmark of critical success factors, and years of experience of working on these issues in their respective cities, CONSOLIDATE peers set out to identify the ways in which this work could be progressed in their four cities: Sofia, Athens, Milan and Fuenlabrada.
It was intense! With only two and a half days in each city, our team of ten peers conducted nearly 90 interviews and gathered around 400 pieces of evidence on how host cities could improve their work on integrating refugees and other newcomers into the labour market. Having now completed the presentations to the city representatives and politicians, and had some time to catch our breath, here are some key reflections from the CONSOLIDATE community of practice on “Tools for the effective labour market integration for refugees and other newcomers.”
Empower cities to better meet local need
Addressing labour market integration at the city and local level comes with many clear advantages, including granular knowledge of community needs, local labour markets, and the wider infrastructure and support needed to facilitate broader integration (housing, health services, childcare provision, etc).
Fuenlabrada’s starting point is a modern local employment service, offering training and entrepreneurship support. True to Fuenlabrada’s mainstreaming philosophy, the city does not want to create segregated services for migrants, but rather ensure that its services reach those who are furthest away from the labour market, including migrants. The city’s commitment to make employment services more accessible for all includes strengthening cooperation with the city’s social services department and with the civil society board for co-existence, which brings together many migrant and neighbourhood associations.
In contrast, peers saw how difficult things could be when cities like Athens and Sofia, with limited municipal competence on migrant integration and employment support were significantly more constrained by what they could do. This was compounded by almost no national funding to support this work and a lack of national leadership or strategy on integration.
And yet, in spite of this, both cities had still found ways to support refugees and other newcomers, such as Ukrainians. In both cities, there is a strong commitment to ensuring the inclusion of newcomers to the City. In Athens there is a strong culture of finding solutions and, alongside the work of NGOs and external sources of funding, this has resulted in a rich landscape of support. In Sofia, peers found many examples of personalised and tailored support being provided by NGOs and the Bureau for Information and Services for Third-Country Nationals (the latter having supported over 6,000 individuals in 3.5 years). How much more could these Cities achieve if they weren’t constrained by highly centralised systems of government and resources? Highly centralised systems of national government look increasingly wanting in the face of cities facing high levels of population change and churn.
The CONSOLIDATE peer reviews also identified other barriers that are not always so easy to tackle and go beyond the area of employment. A lack of places in childcare is perhaps the biggest impediment for migrant women accessing training and work, and yet also an important reminder that access to work requires a holistic approach that cuts across a range of different services, including housing, childcare, and health.
But sometimes it is little details that are completely out of the hands of cities: bureaucratic delays in the renewal of residence permits in Athens can make people lose their jobs, and Bulgarian banks’ restrictive policies towards foreigners make it difficult to open a bank account that would enable them to start working.
Plugging gaps through short term projects is not sustainable
Cities often lack a specific mandate to support unemployed refugees and other newcomers into work, and when they do, this is not often prioritised amidst funding and other political pressures. In Sofia and Athens, such a mandate simply does not exist; in Fuenlabrada it is not explicit for migrants and refugees; and in Milan, targeted actions are framed within a wider set of welfare and integration measures for all vulnerable groups. The main players in labour market integration usually sit elsewhere: the national and regional public employment services, which should help everybody to get onto the labour market, but often lack the connections with local labour markets and the skills to understand what support migrants need and the motivation to support groups that are considered complicated cases, such as migrants.
What has filled this gap is the wealth of NGO-run projects that offer targeted employment support for migrants. As they are often funded by EU programs such as ESF+, they are not stable over time and can be challenging to navigate for migrants. As we heard in Athens, this ‘projectification’ of support has worked very well as a kind of ‘plug in’ model, but it is not sustainable over time.
Involve refugees and migrants to improve both the effectiveness and legitimacy of policies
All cities recognised the importance of the ‘nothing about us without us’ principle. Athens had already begun work in this area and Fuenlabrada had many years of experience to constructively share with the other three cities.
What was clear was that this work needs to be carefully and sensitively done, with clear aims that involve genuine and not tokenistic engagement with the target communities. Trust is key, as is the acceptance that this work is ongoing and never complete. In Fuenlabrada, they started off with the premise that the target communities were equal partners in helping to build the social fabric of the city, and this seems to have helped immensely in shaping the nature of the relationship between the city and its migrant communities going forward.
The potential of employment to change the migration narrative
All CONSOLIDATE cities saw that they could do more in communicating their success stories to change the dominant migration narrative. Telling the story of refugees and migrants working for their new host societies can be powerful to tackle dehumanising migrant stereotypes that are constantly spread, while migrants work in sectors that ensure that societies keep on going.
Often we heard of changes already underway to bring in foreign workers to plug skill gaps. Employers, private employment agencies, and national government were driving these changes but without parallel support being offered to integrate these workers into the communities they settle into. Peers were struck to hear that job shortages in all four cities were ubiquitous and not just confined to the ICT sector. Sofia needs tram drivers, Greece would like to place migrants in agriculture and the tourism sector; Fuenlabrada needs metal and recycling workers; and Milan needs workers in healthcare, tourism, and professional services. Some countries, like Bulgaria and Greece, have bilateral agreements in place to bring in large numbers of foreign workers to fill these posts, while many resident migrants struggle to find an adequate job..
The insecurities of settled populations can often be aggravated by changes that they can see happening around them but cannot explain. Peers felt that cities could play a key role in proactively helping to communicate these changes at a time when far-right elements across Europe are seeking to exploit them to spread division and fear.
There’s a lot that cities can and should do
The minimum role for cities is managing information and coordinating support: offering authoritative and up-to-date information about job coaching and language training can make a difference in an often complex landscape of services and status groups; coordinating services through local stakeholder groups is essential to take stock of what is on offer and which support is needed.
Another key role that all CONSOLIDATE partners strive for is to build relationships with employers: providing help with hiring migrants and matching migrants with job vacancies. This cooperation can go even further: following the peer review, Sofia and Fuenlabrada will pilot co-creating vocational training for migrants with employers from shortage sectors. Existing training is often not in tune with shortages or simply not available for migrants when they cannot accredit sufficient language skills. The capacity to tailor training to what both employers and migrants need is a great way to bring people without jobs into jobs without people.
Cooperation with employers can also mitigate the problem of an often highly bureaucratic and dysfunctional system for the recognition of foreign qualifications. City services can record skills and work with employers to provide migrants the opportunity to demonstrate their skills in practice – in particular in non-regulated and lower level occupations. In other cases, employers highlighted that they place much more importance on soft skills such as aspirations and work ethics than on accredited qualifications. So, cities have a key role here in working with employers to better match jobs and jobseekers. Only by building these relationships can both develop a better understanding of what already exists in terms of the ‘stock’ of skills (supply) and the demand for skills.
