Ethno-religious minorities and labour market integration: generational advancement or decline?

Abstract

This paper examines the generational progress of ethnic minorities in Britain by analysing four labour market outcomes: economic inactivity, unemployment, access to salaried jobs and self-employment. An important contribution of this paper is the possibility to examine the impact of a range of cultural and social resources on employment outcomes, namely language fluency, co-ethnic spouse, co-ethnic employer, bridging and bonding social capital. Controlling for ethnic and religious identities, individual, social and human capital characteristics, it finds clear advantages of language proficiency in obtaining employment and salaried jobs. However, the second generation shows little advancement in all the outcomes examined and a particularly strong religious penalty is found among Muslim women. It concludes that persistent ethno-religious penalty experienced by the second generation poses a serious policy challenge and does little to strengthen our economy or in building a cohesive society.

Keywords:

• ethnicity
• religion
• generation
• language fluency
• labour market integration

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the UK Data Service for provision of the EMBES data used in this paper. I also thank Anthony Heath and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. The weight applied is the final weight for face-to-face survey with all five groups together (Weight_trimmedF2FALL5). All analyses were conducted using the ‘svy’ commands in Stata.

2. The items of co-ethnic and non-ethnic workmates are dropped in the inactivity and unemployment models to avoid problems with the direction of causality. This is because having co-ethnic or non-ethnic workmates may be an outcome rather than a cause in predicting economic inactivity and unemployment. Trade union membership may pose a similar problem but was included for its symmetry with the ‘cultural organization’ item in the bonding index. We tested the models for robustness and its inclusion did not cause major deviations.

3. We replicated the analysis using a composite file of each quarter of the LFS from January 2006 to December 2010. A sub-sample of Wave One respondents aged sixteen to sixty-four was selected for the analysis. We found no ethnic penalty for Indians in any employment outcome (economic inactivity, unemployment, access to salaried jobs and self-employment. The results are not reported here.

4. To maximize the number of cases in the analysis, we include respondents who reported having multiple owners of their workplaces. It could be that multiple owners included at least one co-ethnic owner, in which case these workplaces may treat employees from ethnic backgrounds equally.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sin Yi Cheung

SIN YI CHEUNG is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University