Integrating Recent Refugees into the Labour Market: The Action Net in Austria

Refugees’ labour market integration is a “grand challenge” of contemporary society. Research and practice have highlighted obstacles that refugees face when entering host country labour markets, for example, related to integration policies, support measures and language skills. Although these obstacles are well known, the question of how support to overcome them is organised remains largely unexplored. While institutional and individual factors affect refugees’ employment, their integration takes place in a specific organisational context with multiple actors involved, such as the public employment service, non-governmental support organisations and employers. In this chapter, we analyse organising practices aimed at integrating refugees into the labour market, through the example of support in Austria. The questions we address include: How is the labour market integration of refugees organised? How does the institutional context influence the organising of integration? How do organisations collaborate towards refugee employment? We address these questions contrasting the context of Ukrainian arrivals in Austria in 2022 with earlier years, when most refugees came from Afghanistan and Syria.