New article investigates how migrants’ working conditions differ from those of native-born and why

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted a number of “essential” or “system-relevant” occupations, which were exempted from the limitations that other occupations faced during the pandemic, notably during lockdowns. Because these occupations were chosen in a pragmatic emergency response to a major threat, they likely represent a useful approximation of the activities truly needed to sustain the provision of basic goods and services. Therefore, a better understanding of essential occupations can support countries’ efforts to weather such crises and help increase their resilience in the longer run.

While this newly emerged class of essential occupations has hardly been explored, it has been noted that they include many jobs with low pay and low prestige, comparatively often filled by migrants (Gelatt, 2020Fasani and Mazza, 2020aKoebe et al., 2020). This paper uses a range of indicators to take a closer look at the working conditions in essential occupations in Germany. The focus on working conditions is linked to employee retention, the quality of basic services and their resilience during crises.

A key concern is that adverse working conditions in essential occupations could lead to high employee turnover, as has been documented for nurses (e.g. Galletta et al., 2011) and in other contexts (Martin, 2003Cottini et al., 2011). This would imply that occupation-specific knowledge is lost at a high rate and incentives to invest in occupation-specific human capital are undermined. Permanent staff shortages may arise – as is arguably the case for nursing and care occupations – which likely make an occupation more vulnerable to a crisis. While employers might consider a high-turnover work environment as one option among several human-resource strategies, this strategy may be dangerous in the case of essential occupations.

This is a part of an article published by Friedrich Poeschel and Anton Nivorozhkin.