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Tens of thousands of Romanian migrants work in the German construction sector. Their work is often characterized by unpaid wages, long workdays and by the withholding of sick or holiday payments. The risky and exploitative nature of the conditions under which Romanian migrants work on German construction sites is reflected in their negative evaluation of their engagements as “slave labor” by Romanian workers. Starting from such a clearly negative evaluation, the paper asks how Romanian construction workers in Germany classify their work and what role such classifications have within the context of labor exploitation. Based on qualitative interviews with and participant observation among Romanian construction site workers in Germany and in Romania, the article reconstructs four work classifications. Work may be interpreted as the fulfillment of obligations or as necessary for economic revenue; hard work itself can be a symbolic contribution to one’s own sense of identity or it can have the meaning of being part of everyday normalcy. Each of the work classifications offers a different reason to make hard work plausible in the eyes of the workers and employers actively turn such interpretations into a mechanism of vulnerability. Without direct physical coercion, these ideas motivate workers to take on work that they themselves criticize as ‘slave labor.’ The paper concludes by arguing that the recognition of such classifications and their social effects are crucial for an understanding of labor exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anti-COVID-19 restrictions and lack of face-to-face learning have increased depression and anxiety among students, alienating them from the university milieu. It can be argued that students suffered from the phenomenon of social anomie during the pandemic restrictions between 2020 and 2022. After the lifting of these restrictions in March 2022, some universities in Romania adopted blended learning, both face-to-face and online. In this context, did the partial return to face-to-face teaching reduce the anomic phenomenon that students faced during the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer this question means to observe whether students integrated into the university milieu during blended learning. Based on a sample of 130 respondents enrolled in undergraduate courses at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work in Bucharest, it was observed that students, counter to expectations, integrated into the mixed university milieu embraced after March 2022. The inter- and intra-personal processes in J. Weidman's conceptual framework explain this. Integration was possible because students befriended their own peers, peers with whom they had only interacted online during the pandemic restrictions. Also, the satisfaction they felt at going back to the "lost" style during the COVID-19 restrictions made students feel closer to their own faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 4th edition of the Social Work International Conference (SWIC) took place in Bucharest between the 7th and 8th of November 2019. The conference is organised by the Department of Social Work, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, in collaboration with the Association of Schools of Social Work in Romania (ASSWR). We present the main activities of the conference, namely the workshops, the keynote speeches, and the presentation of papers in the fi eld of social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is voluntary work a pathway channelling transition for school to work, or from inactivity to activity, or rather a top up activity for those already employed? The paper aims to identify trends in the voluntary work in Romania as against EU countries, to profile the persons engaged in voluntary work, as well as to analyse the way the profile changed over time. Also, the article emphasizes the work related values of those involved in voluntary works. This analysis is based on the date sets of European Values Study for the period 1990-2008 (three waves). The survey is based on probabilistic samples that are representative for the population aged 18+ years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]