In the USA the public sector has been an important avenue of occupational advance for African Americans (possibly because of the role of affirmative action programs). Work in Britain by Anthony Heath and Sin Yi Cheung for the Department of Work and Pensions has also shown that many ethnic minorities are somewhat over-represented in the public sector and experience lesser ethnic penalties in the public sector than they do in the private sector. In France, there are indications from Roxane Silberman’s work that the Maghrebin second generation also experience less ethnic penalty in the public sector than in the private sector (in part due to the youth programs) but the situation may differ for other ethnic groups. In other countries such as Austria or Germany, where many of the second generation do not have citizenship, we expect to find that ethnic minorities are seriously under-represented in the public sector. These differences in access to public sector employment may help to explain some of the major cross-national differences in ethnic penalties that have been found in the just-completed crossnational study (edited by Heath and Cheung) on ethnic minority disadvantage in the labour market. They also raise important policy issues about the role of citizenship in hindering or facilitating access to public sector employment. The research will also be a contribution to the more general discussion about discrimination on the labour markets. For instance, some Swedish economists tested the hypothesis that there is less discrimination in highly competitive parts of the labour market. The idea is that the more a labour market works in accordance with an unregulated market the higher the cost for discrimination (at least some kinds of discrimination). They found some empirical support for this. This hypothesis is at least somewhat contradictory to findings of less discrimination in the public sector.
Our proposal is therefore to carry out a cross-national investigation of the public and private sectors. The group, including Anthony Heath, Sin Yi Cheung, Neli Demireva, Roxane Silberman, Irène Fournier, Irena Kogan and Erik Bihagen (Richard Alba, now an Equalsoc associated member could also join), has conducted some preliminary discussions and work in the frame of the Soccult workshops in 2006 (Oxford) and 2007 (Barcelona and Milano) with no specific funding.
A first step has been to acquire better understanding of the public sector in the corresponding host societies, clarifying what kind of activities the public sector encompasses, such as for example transportation, health, etc, the relationships between public sector and public status, characteristics of the public status, ways of getting a public status and whether some occupations are restricted only to nationals. Country-specific peculiarities, legal rules and informal practices underlying the public sector have been discussed. In the case of Germany for instance, they have die Beamten, which includes the service sector, but the German public sector is broader than simply die Beamten, but there may be some doubts as to whether the people who work outside Beamten but still hold public service jobs, understand that they are in the public sector, and report so in surveys. A second step has been to discuss the data problems and to determine and produce the descriptive statistics needed for crossnational comparison. A first set of statistics (to be updated and completed in some cases) has been produced till now for UK, Germany, France and Sweden. It should ideally be extended to the US.
The next step, having produced a harmonized cross-national dataset, will be to model the data. Loglinear models provide an effective way of testing whether the relationship between ethnic penalties and public/private sector employment varies across the four countries and will establish the magnitude of the differences. A further step is to consider whether the size of the ethnic penalties in the sectors might be due to selection effects. The difficulty here however is to find variables that account for choice of employment in the public or private sector but are not directly related to occupational success. We will however need to explore the possibility of modeling these processes. A final step would be to consider changes over time. There have been reforms in both Britain and Germany that might be relevant. In Germany there has been the changes in citizenship legislation while in Britain there has been the introduction of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act which imposed a duty on, the public sector (but not on the private sector) to promote equal opportunities. These provide ‘natural experiments’ which may give some leverage on understanding the causal mechanisms involved.