39 4, XVIII, 2015 Economics DOI: 10.15240/tul/001/2015-4-003 Introduction The issue of equal opportunities in the labour market is a highly topical issue, requiring the public attention. Considering that the Slovak Republic is already more than ten years a member of the European Union, it is necessary to address the issue not only on the national but also on the supranational level. The institutions of the European Union, using various instruments and taking complementary actions are trying to ensure equal opportunities in the labour market of the EU. To help achieving this objective, it is, however, necessary to ensure enforcing equal opportunities, as well as efforts and actions taken by individual Member States. Despite some progress made in the area of equal opportunities in the EU labour market and gradually leads to elimination of discriminatory conduct based on common characteristics such as age, sex or disability, Slovak Republic significantly lags behind the EU average. Moreover, there are existing prejudges towards some groups in the Slovak labour market. The main reason for selecting this issue was their common interest was twofold. Firstly, to address the current situation of disadvantaged groups in the labour market of the Slovak Republic. Secondly, the authors wished to contribute to improving the current state of play that seems to remain to be an open-ended process. The results of various studies clearly confirm that the phenomenon of discrimination on the labour market exists. This statement is justified not only by job-seekers, but also by employees as well as managers themselves. The reason for this discrimination can be various: health, racial or ethnic origin, sex, religious belief, age or others. It seems neither the society, nor the individual responsible authorities pay sufficient attention to deal with this problem in an efficient way. So far it has been paid a very limited attention to complex and comprehensive surveys on disadvantaged groups on the Slovak labour market that would in particular take into account the perception of these groups by the managers as representatives of potential employer of job seekers from the disadvantaged groups. Institutions as well as individual authors mostly focus on individual and group characteristics; however a complex look at this area is still missing. This perhaps might also be one of the reasons of the fundamental problem of perception of disadvantaged groups among the public. This is naturally reflected in perception, acceptance and persistence of discrimination. The main aim of this paper is to reveal the current situation of selected disadvantaged groups on the labour market in the Slovak Republic from the point of view of managers of selected organisations, using the method of questionnaire survey. In the context of developments in selected research periods (2008, 2014) we tried to examine the attitudes of managers of organisations in the Slovak Republic in relation to selected disadvantaged groups and to verify the existence of discriminatory behaviour of managers against these groups. 1. Theoretical Aspects of the Topic The Slovak legislation in the Employment Services Act no. 5/2004 [22] defines disadvantaged jobseekers as citizens who in respect to their age, length of their registration for job, lack of experience, state of health, loss of ability to carry out their previous employments, family reasons or position in the society have difficulties to find an employment on the labour market and this group undoubtedly needs increased attention of the society. The Article 8 [22] specifies fifteen disadvantaged labour market participants groups. The classification into these groups is based on the following factors: the age, the impossibility ATTITUDES OF MANAGERS TOWARDS DISADVANTAGED GROUPS ON THE LABOUR MARKET IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC René Pawera, Vladimíra Pazderová, Marian Šuplata