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Six Czech unemployed Romanies accept jobs within EU project

22 October 2012
2 minute read

Six Romanies from Ostrava’s Bedriska vicinity, notorious for conflicts between Romanies and the majority population members, have accepted the local mayor’s offer to work on the locality’s maintenance, the Romany Civic Groups’ Association (AROS) head Petr Krones has told CTK.

The six Romany men will do the work within the EU’s Return to Work project, he said.

The jobs have been offered to the Romanies by AROS along with Liana Janackova (for the Independents), mayor of Ostrava’s Marianske Hory and Hulvaky districts where Bedriska is situated.

AROS says it wants to find jobs for 25 Ostrava Romanies.

"It is a big problem to bring long-unemployed Romanies to work, and it is a big success to make at least a single one keep working," Krones said.

He said AROS addressed a hundred Romanies in the Slezska Ostrava district but it managed to make only six of them work.
In the Ostrava-Vitkovice district, AROS could offer jobs to ten Romanies, but only a single one managed to complete the necessary retraining course to become a welder.

Krones said unemployed Romanies shun work also because most of them are indebted.

"When the authorities find out that the people have started to work legally, distrainers take the earnings away from them. Another problem is that young Romanies know nothing but social allowances. It is mostly people aged over 40 who are interested in gaining a job. These people used to work under the communist regime," Krones said.

Like him, Mayor Janackova was surprised by the interest the six Romanies, out of the eight the town hall had addressed, showed in the job offer.

Janackova was catapulted to the media attention earlier this summer when her opponents disclosed the recordings of racist utterances she made about Romanies from the Bedriska vicinity.

Several pro-Romany organisations have lodged criminal complaints against Janackova over her words about a dynamite and an electric fence in connection with the local Romanies.

The Ostrava police are dealing with the case.

FOTO: AROS

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