• Mia Michelle Haugaard Madsen
  • Christopher Bjørn Vendelbo Klapproth
4. term, Public Administration and Social Science (Master Programme)
The Danish society evolves at a high speed and in a direction where manual labor jobs are fewer and further apart. Over the past few decades manual labor workers In Denmark have experienced a steep reduction in potential work. This development in combination with the technological advancements paints a sinister and dark future for the low and unskilled workforce. Due to this development it’s important that the structural institutions that help the workers find work have the best possible tools to especially help the unskilled part of the labor force. But the unskilled workers have another big problem, they are easily replaceable and during economic hardship this group of workers are usually the first to go. Studies have found that networking has a big impact on an individual’s chances to find work. This especially applies to the group of unskilled individuals that don’t have diplomas that can help them “sell” them self during a job interview. Due to this fact this group must rely on the word of mouth and recommendations from others to find jobs. In Denmark studies have found that approximately 40 percent of the total workforce have found their current job thru networking of some sort. This led us to our problem “To which extent does the social network have significance in relation to obtaining information about work, as well as the chance of acquiring work for unskilled workers”. The purpose of asking this question is to find out if the institutions responsible for unemployed workers could benefit from taking a different approach to helping unskilled workers find work. These institutions are called “Job centers” and are administrated by the local government and they encourage the unemployed workers to use their own networks to enter or reenter the labor market. But one thing is to encourage individuals to use their networks but what about those individuals that have limited networks or no networks? With the majority of unskilled workers getting work thru these channels it would seem natural to investigate if networking should be prioritized greater in the Danish unemployment system. This paper has set out to attempt to discover how strong the effect of networking is for the unskilled group of the Danish workforce especially what type of networking whether it be weak or strong ties would benefit this group the most. We have done this by interviewing unskilled informants split into two different groups. The first group where individuals that had no work and the second group where individuals that currently held a job. Due to the global rampage of Covid-19 this study had to undergo a redesign to secure more and reliable data. We did this by creating a survey that was send out thru our own network and through various Facebook sites. The theoretical framework of this paper is to be credited to Mark Granovetter (Strength of weak ties 1973) & (Getting a job 1995) But we didn’t only look at the supply side of this equation we also chose to investigate the demand side. We did this by interviewing employers that hired unskilled workers. The interviewed employers represented two different industries being retail and construction. We chose these two industries due to the high representation of unskilled workers. Conclusion In this paper we found that employers hiring unskilled labor do this using primarily networking. Especially using weak ties seemed to have at greatly positive effect on unemployment where employers explained they would acquire better information about a potential employee. This effect wasn’t equally strong across all employers. We continued our investigation and found that the job centers weren’t assisting their citizens all too well. We found results that indicated the employers wanted workers that are motivated. The case was that all our employers expressed to us that individuals from job centers in their eyes lacked motivation. This was the biggest factor for the employers for being hesitant with employing this group of unskilled workers from the job centers. Due to the results in this paper we conclude that weak ties do play a considerable roll for unskilled workers when it comes to finding work. Therefore, the argument can be made that the Danish job centers and employment policies could benefit from attempting to increase the networks of these unskilled workers. Although we made the argument that networking and especially weak ties seem to make an impact, we still recommend further research in this area. The reasoning behind this thought is that we with no certainty can say what kind of practical networking approach is the most efficient.
LanguageDanish
Publication date28 May 2020
Number of pages100
ID: 333163795