Immigration has, within just a few decades, reshaped Europe and introduced new forms of ethnic inequality. How minorities are included in the labor market is one of the key societal challenges of our time. The workplace plays a crucial role – both as a social arena and as a site where economic rewards are distributed and social status negotiated in practice.
This is the starting point for the research project Firm Evidence on Ethnic Stratification (FIRMSTRAT), which investigates how workplaces and organizations shape the career opportunities of immigrants. The project draws on unique linked employer–employee data, offering a precise view of where and how inequalities arise – and under what conditions they are reduced.
We examine, for example, what characterizes workplaces where pay gaps between immigrant and majority employees are particularly large or small, even when workers have similar qualifications. Are such differences smaller in workplaces with fixed wage-setting rules and collective agreements? And how do technological changes affect the career prospects of employees with immigrant backgrounds? Are pay gaps the result of unequal pay for equal work at the same employer, or do they mainly arise through the sorting of immigrants and the majority into different industries, occupations, and workplaces? How do patterns of ethnic workplace segregation emerge and change? And how do networks – for instance among neighbors, former coworkers, and managers – shape the recruitment of immigrants into different workplaces?
The project has documented several important patterns showing how workplaces shape ethnic inequality in the labor market. Pay gaps between immigrants and the majority rarely emerge within the same job at the same employer, but rather through sorting into different industries, occupations, and workplaces. At the same time, pay differences tend to be smaller where collective institutions regulate wage setting, such as in highly unionized workplaces or licensed occupations. Further analyses show that the implementation of new technologies in firms does not lead to higher job exits among immigrants and their children compared to the majority population, but wage gains from such changes accrue disproportionately to majority employees.
We also find that both immigrants and their children are often concentrated in workplaces with many other immigrants – frequently from the same country of origin. This reinforces ethnic workplace segregation, although the degree of such overexposure is lower among the children of immigrants. While immigrants are strongly overrepresented in immigrant-dense workplaces, children of immigrants are more dispersed across the labor market, though still more likely than the majority population to work alongside other immigrants. These patterns are partly explained by differences in education, occupational sorting, industry of employment, and network effects, especially through neighbors and managers with immigrant backgrounds. At the same time, the higher educational attainment and occupational status of children of immigrants provide them greater access to majority-dominated and better-paid workplaces, contributing to a gradual reduction in ethnic workplace segregation from immigrants to their children.
In addition, immigrants are more likely to be employed in physically demanding jobs, while the majority is more often found in occupations requiring higher analytical, language, and socio-emotional skills. Children of immigrants resemble the majority more closely in occupational patterns, though traces of their parents’ labor market positions remain. These differences diminish with longer residence and across generations. Ongoing work in the project also shows that immigrants have lower job turnover in immigrant-dense workplaces, especially when coworkers share the same country background, which may reinforce ethnic workplace segregation. As part of this ongoing work, we also examine in greater detail how networks – through ties to neighbors, former coworkers, and managers – shape the recruitment of immigrants into different workplaces.
A new study published in Nature – one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals – shows that pay gaps are rarely due to unequal pay for the same job at the same employer. Instead, they mainly arise through sorting into different industries, occupations, and workplaces. The study also shows that these patterns are most pronounced for immigrants, while children of immigrants move closer to the majority but still face barriers related to overqualification and restricted access to the most attractive and well-paid jobs. This research documents these dynamics in Norway as well as in eight other countries across Europe and North America, and has received broad international attention with coverage in leading newspapers and media outlets in Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United States, and beyond.
Large-scale immigration to the rich, liberal democracies in the West over the past several decades has put economic incorporation of disadvantaged immigrant-origin ethnic minorities high on the public agenda in the 21st century. Despite a vast literature on labor market inequalities between immigrant-origin and native populations, the great majority of these studies is based on surveys of individual workers and yield limited knowledge about the role of workplaces and firms.
This project moves the field forward by addressing how employment segregation and internal organizational mechanisms within workplaces and firms shape economic assimilation both within and across immigrant generations. The novelty of my approach lies in bringing an organizational focus on local workplace contexts as key sites shaping the dynamics of ethnic stratification in contemporary labor markets, with a key focus on changes in workplace inequalities across immigrant generations.
Theoretical innovation will be pursued by confronting theories of immigrant assimilation and organizational inequality with empirical studies of local workplace contexts. I will address how immigrant workplace inequalities both reflect and shape the salience of ethnic boundaries and minority-majority status distinctions. A key goal is to probe whether, how, and why ethnic inequalities (e.g., wage gaps) vary across organizational contexts, net of individual worker traits.
The project exploits linked employer-employee data covering the whole economy, which enables me to study employment segregation and the organizational dynamics of immigrant economic assimilation in high detail. These world-class data allows me to situate workers in their local workplaces, enabling the study of immigrant-native inequalities in, e.g., wage setting and worker mobility using state-of-the-art methods.
The main empirical focus will be on Norwegian workplaces, but the project will also draw on selected cross-national comparisons.
