Essential Work, Migrant Labour: What Explains Migrant Employment in European Key Sectors?

Résumé 0

Amidst the COVID-19 lockdowns, it became obvious that migrantsplay a critical role in economic sectors that are essential to the functioningof everyday life. Are they over-represented in these sectors, and how isthe use of migrant labour linked to structural factors in the provision of essentialservices? Using micro data from the EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS)2011-2020 for 17 countries, this paper investigates the extent and the drivers ofmigrants’ over-representation in key sectors (e.g. health, long-term care, foodsupply) relative to the rest of the economy. We measure the difference in theprobability of working in key sectors for various types of migrants to similarnatives across countries of destination. Our results show that in most countries,migrants are over-represented with respect to native-born workers afteraccounting for individual characteristics. We also provide an overview of thecorrelation between this residual over-representation and potential structuralfactors. We find a strong and robust correlation between migrants’ relativeemployment probability in key sectors and precarious job conditions, the degreeof autonomy and flexibility at work, as well as attitudes to migrants, bothat the country-level and across sub-national regions.