Abstract. The crisis of late 2000s has confirmed that the institutional structure of the labor market remains one of the main factors influencing employment under changing economic conditions. At first glance, in many European countries the containment of unemployment was executed successfully during the crisis. However, this can prevent a recovery of demand for labor and lead to maintaining and even increasing the unemployment and economic inactivity. All this may exacerbate the problem of segmentation of the labor market. In turn, as the economic situation improves the rapid growth of unemployment in the United States and some other countries with liberal model of labor market can quickly be quickly replaced by the opposite trend. Namely, even though the unemployment rate may not go back to the pre-crisis level it can, at least, again approach to it.