Round table meeting held in Chernihiv

On 15 February 2008, a round table meeting was held at the Chernihiv Regional Employment Centre, titled ‘On ways of cooperation between the regional employment service and the Department of the State Department of Ukraine for the Execution of Sentences in the Chernihiv region regarding career guidance work among convicts’.

During the conversation at the round table, it was noted that about 700 people are released from penal institutions in the Chernihiv region every year. And all of them need to be employed, because a former convict without a job is a potentially dangerous person to society who can return to old ways at any time, because according to statistics, after being left without money, such a person commits a crime in the majority of cases.

Last year, 21 jobs were reserved for this category of persons, and the utilisation rate was 100 per cent. This year, 31 jobs have been reserved at enterprises in the Chernihiv region. Since the beginning of this year, 9 citizens who have served their sentences have already been employed, including 2 in reserved positions.

It was noted that former convicts are often released without documents—birth certificates, passports, work record books. This prevents them from obtaining the status of unemployed, which, of course, significantly worsens their adaptation to new living and working conditions.

Of course, everyone knows that employers are not very happy when former convicts come to work for them. But in such a case, a mandatory agreement applies: for two years, the employer does not have the right to make the new employee redundant or to provide them with worse working conditions.