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Black men, Pakistani women fare worst in the UK job market

The government has been told they need to provide greater support for jobless BME persons and close the unemployment gap.

A new report by the Policy Studies Institute called ‘Unemployed Ethnic Minorities Urgently Need More Help’ has shown that many members of the ethnic minority communities are not having their employment needs met, some even feeling ‘dissatisfied and frustrated’ with the Jobcentre Plus system.

African, black Caribbean males and Pakistani females account for the largest groups of unemployed persons in the UK, while white British females are least likely to be unemployed.

Chinese and Indians are better favoured than their African counterparts, but less than whites in the job market.

Bangladeshis, Pakastani males and other Asians, who are likely to be Muslims, also experience high levels of unemployment.

Afro-Caribbean unemployed mother of one Adina McCarthy said: “The advisers never ask what work you want to do or what qualifications you have or anything you want to get into. It is basically, ‘the computers for you to search are over there, see what you can find, phone the number on the bottom.’

“Every time I’d go into the Jobcentre it looked like the staff didn’t want to be there so they would not exert themselves to help the unemployed.”

The report, written by Dr Maria Hudson, Dr Helen Barnes, Dr. Kath Ray and Prof Alan Marsh, includes qualitative problems such as customers encountering employment discrimination, mis-managed courses and language barriers for those who do not speak English.

Dr Hudson said: “Recent Jobcentre Plus initiatives have strengthened rules and procedures to help ethnic minority applicants achieve a better rate of entry to work.

”There remains a gulf in practice and understanding that can be closed by new staff training, particularly in multilingual services and wider recruitment. This will require the injection of new resources.”

For Adina, who has been looking for a job for over a year, this report comes at the right time.

“I think the government could do much more to help. I know a lot of black people and they go for a lot of jobs but the majority of them don’t get them. And these people went to university to get their degrees and they are still not in the jobs they are meant to be in.”

INTERVIEWS

Commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, the report was collated using interviews with 84 Pakistani, Bangladeshi, black Caribbean and black African customers of Jobcentre Plus.

It is these customers who, according to 2004 statistics, account for the highest percentage of unemployment in the country, with 14 per cent of all black Caribbean men and black African men unemployed.

Dr Hudson said: “We were commissioned to provide a greater understanding of ethnic minority experiences of customers of Jobcentre Plus and how their experiences compare with white customers – also to draw out the commonalties and similarities, while providing some recommendations for how things might be improved.”

According to the report, recommendations to improve Jobcentre Plus services include more training for existing advisers and better awareness of customer discrimination complaints procedures.

But some users of the system think that BME communities will always be on the bottom of the employment list. Dre, a 22-year-old black British man, from Brixton, stood outside the Jobcentre on Ferndale Road last Thursday. He has been looking for work for the past four months and believes that although black people get a raw deal, unemployment is an issue that transcends race.

“The Jobcentre staff don’t do anything for black people; they just want us to take all the cleaning jobs. They’re not giving a lot of people opportunities; they just categorise people like ‘just because we come to the Jobcentre, we don’t want to work’ … like we’re the scum of the earth. But not everyone is like that.

“It’s all about the government at the end of the day; if they give us the opportunity, people would take it. But if they don’t give us the opportunity then what’s left for us?

“It’s not even about race, it’s deeper than colour. It’s all about what the government does because they make the system. And the people in the Jobcentre as well. They have to want to help us.”

Published: 22 May 2006
Issue: 1219

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