YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Employment and entrepreneurship  127 Young people continue to participate in the labour market mainly through flexible forms of employment, which include part-time and atypical jobs in addition to temporary employment. Since 2015, the share of young people in such forms of employment has decreased significantly. However, Slovenia remains well above the European average in its share of young people in temporary employment and the share of young people working atypical hours. The age segmentation of the labour market in terms of greater flexibility for young people is linked to lower job stability, which in turn affects young people’s ability to make “full economic and social independence” (Ignjatović and Trbanc, 2009: 40), and to make important life choices, including family formation (IMAD, 2008: 42). Temporary employment also increases the risk of poverty (IMAD, 2010: 138). In addition to the above-mentioned analysis of the labour market situa- tion in Slovenia, something else bears mentioning as well; the improve- ment in the labour market situation is much less distinct when taking into account the data obtained in the framework of the national youth studies. More specifically, if young people who are enrolled in education are excluded, the results of the analyses based on data from the Mladina 2000, Mladina 2010, and Mladina 2020 surveys show that the percent- age of those who claim to be unemployed is not only much higher than the official statistics (between 18.4% and 21.5%), but that it is still slight- ly higher than the one that was measured in the immediate aftermath of the 2008/2009 financial crisis (when the unemployment rate measured in this way was between 15.9% and 17.5%), and noticeably higher than the one measured in 2000 (unemployment rate measured between 11.5% and 11.8%). In Figures 4.5 and 4.6, we show the measured unemployment rate in two contexts in terms of young people’s labour market participa- tion. As the answers provided for the two related survey questions were largely different, the percentages for the individual, otherwise compara- ble categories also differ slightly. However, these variations are so small that they do not affect the main research findings in any way.