ABSTRACT
This article provides the first systematic assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on the labor market for immigrant workers in Europe. The authors estimate that in 2020 extra-EU migrants were twice as likely and EU migrants were 1.6 times as likely to experience employment loss relative to comparable natives. To understand the determinants of these large gaps, the article focuses on three job characteristics—essentiality, temporariness, and teleworkability—and documents that migrants were overrepresented among essential, temporary, and low-teleworkable occupations at the onset of the pandemic. The authors estimate that pre-pandemic occupational sorting accounts for 25 to 35% of the explained migrant–native gap in the risk of employment termination, while sorting into industries accounts for the rest of the explained gap. More than half of this gap remains unexplained. Although major employment losses were averted thanks to the massive use of short-time work programs in Europe, migrant workers—particularly extra-EU migrants—suffered from high economic vulnerability during the pandemic. © The Author(s) 2023.
ABSTRACT
Background and Aims: The effects of community closures and relaxing social distancing restrictions on severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) by occupational risk remain unclear. Therefore, we evaluated the impact of community closures and reopening phases with the prevalence of testing SARS-CoV-2-positive among nonessential and essential workers. Methods: We constructed a cross-sectional cohort from March 20 to July 31, 2020, of 344 adults from Metropolitan Nashville, Tennessee. We performed an unconditional logistic regression model to evaluate the impact of community closures and phase implementation on testing SARS-CoV-2 positive by occupation to estimate adjusted prevalence odds ratios (aPORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: During a stay-at-home/Phase I order, those with non-essential occupations had 59% decreased prevalence odds (aPOR:0.41; 95% CI: 0.20-0.84) of testing SARS-CoV-2-positive compared to when no restrictions were in place. Persons with essential occupations had four times the prevalence odds of testing SARS-CoV-2-positive (aPOR:4.19; 95% CI:1.57-11.18) compared with nonessential occupations when no community restrictions were established. Conclusion: Stay-at-home restrictions were associated with a lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the community for nonessential workers. Essential employees remained at increased risk for SARS-CoV-2, including when no community restrictions were in place and vaccines were not available. This study supports targeting prevention measures for these high-risk occupations.
ABSTRACT
Following a national lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, state governments in Germany published lists of "essential" occupations that were considered necessary to maintain basic services such as health care, social care, food production and transport. This paper examines working conditions in these essential occupations and identifies clusters of similar jobs. Differences across clusters are highlighted using detailed data on job characteristics including working conditions, tasks and educational requirements. Two clusters with favourable or average working conditions account for more than three-quarters of jobs in essential occupations. Another two clusters, comprising 20% of jobs in essential occupations, are associated with unfavourable working conditions such as low pay, job insecurity, poor prospects for advancement and low autonomy. These latter clusters exhibit high shares of migrants. An Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is used to investigate which individual characteristics explain why migrants are more likely to have unfavourable working conditions. The results suggest that lacking proficiency in the host-country language is the main barrier to improving migrants' working conditions.