Labour market entry poses enormous challenges for recently arrived refugees, ranging from language barriers, devaluation of human capital, unfamiliarity with customs of the job search process to outright discrimination. How can refugees overcome these challenges and quickly enter gainful employment? In this paper, we draw on interviews with 26 male and female refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, conducted in 2017 and 2018, who came to Austria in 2015 and 2014 and who have successfully entered employment. We depict refugees' own perspectives on and strategies for fast job entry and integration. Personal agency and a proactive approach of seeking and seizing opportunities are key for overcoming initial barriers and entering upon positive integration pathways. At the same time, refugees' personal agency is essential for establishing social ties to the host society, which also play a crucial role in early labour market integration. Finally, institutions of the Austrian labour market (the 'apprenticeship'-system) interact with refugees' agency in most intricate ways, both setting up nearly insurmountable barriers but also providing specific opportunities for refugees.

This paper deals with job search strategies and wages among crossborder commuters residing in the Central European Region (CEN-TROPE). Our main aim is to investigate the role of social networks as constitutive for job searching and for successful labor market integration. We build upon a theoretical framework developed by Aguilera and Massey, reflecting on the nexus of social networks, job search methods, and related labor market outcomes. Methodologically, we use a new quantitative survey on the employment careers of cross-border commuters residing in the regions of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary bordering on Austria, conducted in the winter/ spring of 2012/2013 (N = 2,573). Our results corroborate the hypothesis that human and social capital resources as well as labor market characteristics serve as key factors for job search and labor market integration among cross-border commuters in the CEN-TROPE transnational labor market.

This article investigates the impacts of negative labor market experiences on the life satisfaction of European East–West mobile workers by taking Czech, Slovak and Hungarian cross-border commuters working in Austria as an example. The recent literature has indicated a ‘dark side’ of East–West mobility, as many mobile Eastern Europeans face negative labor market experiences in the Western labor markets. If East–West commuters accept such experiences, employers and employees may quite easily subvert working standards, with detrimental effects on host countries that are intertwined in cross-border labor markets. Empirically, this study used a sequential mixed-methods design, based on quantitative and qualitative data from a research project on East–West commuters in Austria. The empirical findings showed that the negative labor market experiences are not important for commuters’ life satisfaction. From a multitude of those experiences under investigation, only ethnic discrimination experiences had a significantly negative impact. Instead, life satisfaction was mainly influenced by the overall health status and the perception that one’s own living conditions have improved in comparison with those of others from one’s country of origin. The in-depth qualitative findings corroborated the quantitative findings in terms of the low relevance of negative labor market experiences for the subjective assessments of commuting.

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