As EU Sounds Alarm on Workforce Shortages, Roma Offer the Answer

Today the European Commission told every EU government the same thing: you cannot fix your economy without fixing your workforce. The Roma Foundation for Europe has been making that argument for years. The Commission’s own figures make the case: 77 per cent of firms now cite labour and skills shortages as a barrier to investment. One in five workers is trapped in low-wage, low-productivity employment. 

The Commission’s warning came as part of its Spring Package, a set of annual recommendations to every EU member state on where economic and social policy is falling short. This year, those recommendations put skills, vocational training and reskilling at the heart of economic governance. 

Roma are Europe’s largest minority—approximately six million in EU member states, with one of the youngest age profiles on the continent. Today, only 43 per cent of Roma aged 20 to 64 are in employment. Among Roma women, that figure falls to 28 per cent. More than half of Roma aged 15 to 24 are not in education, employment or training—nearly five times the EU average. And despite growing demand for workers, employment rates among Roma declined in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia between 2016 and 2021. 

Part of the explanation is structural inertia. Public employment services were not built for flexibility. They operate through standardised eligibility criteria, fixed programme formats and bureaucratic delivery chains that exclude the people furthest from formal work. Roma-specific recommendations have been issued repeatedly—and repeatedly gone unimplemented, because the institutions meant to act on them lack the capacity, the incentive and, in many cases, the willingness to work differently. 

Organisations like the Roma Education Fund and the Roma Entrepreneurship Development Initiative have spent years building the expertise, the community trust and the delivery infrastructure that public agencies cannot replicate. They are ready to partner with governments to implement solutions at scale. With few exceptions, however, governments have not moved to meet them. 

The Roma Foundation for Europe’s analysis shows that closing the Roma employment gap to national averages in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia alone would generate between €1.95 billion and €10 billion in additional GDP each year. Training Roma youth for shortage occupations—roles the European Labour Authority identifies as critically understaffed—delivers fiscal returns within one to four years. 

“Civil servants and programme designers tend to see Roma as long-term unemployed, hard to activate, far from the labour market,” Korunovska said. “That is true for some. But it is not the whole picture—and it is not even the largest part of it. A significant share of Roma are already working: in waste collection, seasonal construction, street trading, informal care. They have skills, they have motivation, they show up every day. What they lack is a contract, a social protection record and a pathway into formal work. Those are much easier transitions to make than activating someone with no work history at all. But public employment systems are not designed to see them—so the easiest wins go uncaptured, year after year.” 

The Commission’s own recommendations already name Roma explicitly as a group requiring targeted labour market integration. But guidance without targeted delivery will not move employment rates. The solutions are not complicated: scale up training in sectors where shortages are documented and reskilling takes months, not years. Remove the practical barriers—childcare, transport, welfare rules that penalise people for entering formal work. Partner with Roma-led organisations that already have the models and the trust. And reach the people who are invisible to public employment services—not because they are disengaged, but because the systems were never designed to find them.