7 June 2006: Ethnic minority populations and the labour market: an analysis of the 1991 and 2001 Census  

I've just been sent a paper copy of the above report, which is the most
serious attempt I've seen to look at unemployment in Britain, and to
analyse the extent to which it is caused by race, ethnicity, gender,
locality and religion.

The full report is over 300 hundred pages long and there's far too much
talk of 'regression', 'chi square', 'dummy variables', etc. 

There's also the familiar tendency of all such work to treat black
people or BME migrants like cans in a bake bean factory: as something
countable, distinct and different: this is migration seen from outside,
not from within. 

Cut through the jargon, however, and the content is a useful
mixture of the familiar and the intriguing.

p. 8. The 'ethnic penalty' experienced by BME people - crucially the
difference between black and white employment rates - have increased for
the second generation of black people in Britain.

p. 55. For BME groups the most effective route out of poverty is
education: it increases black people's chances of finding work to a much
greater extent than it influences white people's chances. 

P. 73. Education is the key to inter-generational economic advance: the
employment boost caused by university education is much more evident
among second rather than first generation migrants. 

p. 85 Whites dominate a number of sectors: farming, fishing, mining,
utilities and construction. People from Caribbean backgrounds are well
represented in construction and in the public sector. People of Chinese
or Bangladeshi origin are most likely to be employed in hotels, catering
and transport. People from Pakistani backgrounds are the only group who
are relatively more likely to be employed than whites in manufacturing.

p. 119 BME women are less likely to work part-time than their white
counterparts; Pakistani men are more likely.

p. 141 All BME groups are more likely than whites to be permanently
incapacitated by long-term sickness or disability.

p. 142 All BME young adults (16-24) are more likely than whites to be in
full-time education.

p. 161 People of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin (all ages) are by some
way the least likely group in Britain to have been employed to
university level. They are also the group within the 16-24 age band with
the least qualifications. On the other hand, they are also the group
whose rate of participation in full-time education at all levels -
including university - is increasing the fastest. 

Text of the full report here:
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/rports2005-2006/Report333.pdf

The point which I found the most useful was probably the following:

p. 10. Of all BME communities Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have by far
the lowest employment rates, leading the authors to conclude that there
is a 'religious penalty' (p. 104) as well as an ethnic penalty. 

It largely confirms what I've written elsewhere:

http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/institutional_racism.html
http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/can_Muslims_be_oppressed.html