Social and welfare issues
Faces of Joblessness - Towards People-centred Employment Support
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The lives and circumstances of jobless people, or those with intermittent, low-paid or unstable employment, are rarely simple. They are often confronted with complex and inter-related employment barriers, such as skills deficiencies, health problems, financial disincentives or care responsibilities. Understanding these barriers is essential for designing policy interventions to overcome them, but systematic and good-quality information on the nature and extents of employment obstacles is currently missing. |
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A typology of employment barriers
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Most face not one barrier, but many Shares with different numbers of simultaneous barriers. |
| The Faces of Joblessness project (see 2-page project flyer) seeks to fill this gap and shed light on the web of individual barriers that stand in the way of stable employment and stronger labour markets. The main objective is to assist policymakers in identifying untapped sources of employment growth, in tailoring and targeting social and employment support in a people-centred manner, and in making existing programmes more cost-effective. |
COUNTRY STUDIES
- Main results on the incidence of employment barriers and policy challenges for selected labour-market groups:
- 2024: Switzerland
- 2020: Finland, Belgium, Korea and Norway
- and also: Australia (2018), Estonia (2017), Ireland (2017), Italy (2017), Lithuania (2017), Portugal (2017), Spain (2017)
- Further results on the anatomy of employment barriers in the entire population of jobless or underemployed: Estonia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain
- Other OECD policy reviews making use of the Faces of Joblessness approach:
- Addressing labour-market challenges in Belgium (OECD Economic Surveys 2020)
- Maintaining high employment in Norway (OECD Economic Surveys 2019)
- Connecting People with Jobs: Key Issues for Raising Labour Market Participation in Australia (2017)
METHODOLOGY AND FURTHER READING
- Overview slides
- Fernandez, R. et al. (2016), Faces of Joblessness: Characterising Employment Barriers to Inform Policy
- Immervoll and Scarpetta (2012), Activation and employment support policies in OECD countries: an overview of current approaches
- OECD Active Labour Market Policies: Connecting People with Jobs
- World Bank report with results for a further six countries: Portraits of labour market exclusion.
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This project was undertaken with the financial assistance of the European Union Programme for Employment and Social Innovation “EaSI” (2014-2020, EC-OECD grant agreement VS/2016/0005, DI150038). |
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