Both Ethnic and Religious: Explaining Employment Penalties Across 14 Ethno‐Religious Groups in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This article uses the case of the probability of being in employment among different ethno‐religious groups in Britain over a period of 12 years (2002–2013) to illustrate how different degrees of labor market penalty in the United Kingdom are highly associated with the different processes of racialization they undergo in the United Kingdom. It is argued that what matters in producing the observed inequalities in the United Kingdom is the inescapable centrality of “color” (mainly blackness) and “culture” (particularly being Muslim) and the way different Muslim and black groups have been racialized. The findings of this study leave little doubt that there is a black and a Muslim penalty in the labor market, but at the same time it suggest that these penalties are not fixed but tend to vary in extent and nature.

Against the odds? – A study of educational attainment and labour market position of the second-generation ethnic minority members in the UK

“…For men and women without unemployment histories in the period covered, ethnic minorities tend to have unemployment rates around ten percentage points higher than those for whites, but for those with prior unemployment histories, black Caribbean men and Pakistani women again have unemployment rates being 10-15 percentage points higher than their white peers. All this suggests that prior unemployment does have a scarring effect as Arulampalam et al (2001) (2010) argued, and that the effect is much more pronounced for minorities than for whites, particularly so for blacks and Muslims, echoing previous analysis by Heath and Martin (2013) and Khattab and Modood (2015).…”

“…Quite a few studies have been conducted on ethnic unemployment during the last 30 years, including that between first and second generation, on 'hyper-cyclical' unemployment, and for second-generation graduates Khattab and Modood, 2015;Khattab and Johnston, 2013;Li, 2015Li, , 2017Li and Heath, 2008, 2017). Yet such studies were based on cross-sectional data and were unable to reveal the dynamics over the life course.…”

Racial discrimination in Britain, 1969–2017: a meta‐analysis of field experiments on racial discrimination in the British labour market

“…Do we still find, as the pioneering 1967 study found, that there is a racial divide with white minorities experiencing less discrimination than non‐white minorities? Surveys of the labour market have shown that black and Muslim minorities tend to have higher rates of unemployment than do similarly qualified white minorities (Khattab and Modood ) but survey research cannot demonstrate that this pattern is the result of discrimination rather than of differences in social capital, information or job‐search strategies.…”

Ethnicity and neighbourhood attainment in England and Wales: A study of second generations' spatial integration

“…I distinguish the most numerous non‐White groups: Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Caribbean, and African. Their contrasting migration histories and settlement patterns (Phillips, ), socio‐economic resources (Platt, Simpson, & Akinwale, ), cultural values and religion (Khattab & Modood, ; Peach, ), and levels of spatial segregation (Catney, ) allow me to develop divergent expectations in terms of their spatial integration.…”

“…I distinguish the most numerous non-White groups: Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Caribbean, and African. Their contrasting migration histories and settlement patterns (Phillips, 1998), socioeconomic resources (Platt, Simpson, & Akinwale, 2005), cultural values and religion (Khattab & Modood, 2015;Peach, 2005), and levels of spatial segregation (Catney, 2017) allow me to develop divergent expectations in terms of their spatial integration. This paper is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to systematically look at patterns of neighbourhood attainment among second generation ethnic minorities in comparison with the majoritarian White British population.…”