This research aims at understanding the difficulties of (occupational) integration for young unskilled people from their way of dealing with the norm. It relies both upon our occupational experience and a survey conducted at L’Atelier, a Strasbourg-based training Center. Relying on the theory of ergology, labor and integration are analyzed in the light of activity. Activity thus considered, a first understanding of young unskilled people’s difficulties of integration into the workplace can be set up. The fact that they fail when they work is due to their unfitness to assert themselves and identify the normative frameworks of work. The difficulties of other youths are due to their focusing only on what matters to them without considering norm-structured work situations.These two work approaches allow us to set up a typology of integration difficulties and to question the responsibilities of caring about those difficulties for the workers dealing with integration.
