Youth joblessness in the EU after EU enlargement

The paper focuses on analysis of the EU labour market of the young people in perspective of the process of europeisation, which can impact societies in many ways, i.e. labor market. The first part of the paper presents the statistics of EU unemployment according to accessible socio-demographic characteristics, which show that work is not equally distributed among different social categories. The young are more in risk to be unemployed. Lack of job of the young people is one of a major problem for most EU countries. Various reasons explain the high incidence of unemployment among young people: segmentation of the labour market; technical and organisational changes that have created a demand for higher qualifications; and the labour market crisis which has meant tougher conditions for unemployed workers. The consequences of being unemployed at young ages are serious in macro and micro perspectives. Youth unemployment is often associated with social problems such as violence, crime, suicide and abuse of alcohol and drugs. Lack of job is one of the most important “producers” of intergenerational inheritance of inequalities, because there is strong correlation between unemployment and poverty. The second part of the paper deals with EU labour market policy in perspective of combating unemployment of the young people. There are presented different EU programmes and good practices, i.e. Youth Pact in the past, which are one of the most important strategy for increasing availability of jobs for young people.