ABSTRACT
People hang around on a street corner, at the fringe of an open-air market, close to a major urban center or at a park-and-ride site and wait to be hired for a day or at best for a week. The typical jobs are low-paid unskilled or semiskilled work on construction sites or in agriculture. As in 1995 and in 1997, in 1998 there was an informal labour market-place in about every fifth Hungarian settlement. As the two case studies showed, the Moscow Square is open to the public. However, in case of a market institution, openness has a different meaning, i.e. the offers are made public for several potentially interested actors. Concerning ethnicity and citizenship, the two major groups were the ethnic Hungarians from Hungary and the ethnic Romanians from Romania. Most of the hypotheses we developed as a result of the pre-research field-work and of the case studies were proven by the yearlong non-participant observation research.
