Migrant Work Ethic

Regression results
A8 Migrants and Work Ethic
In view of the above differences in personal and job characteristics between the two groups, regression analysis is employed in order to control for these differences and therefore to compare the work ethic of observationally similar UK national and A8 migrant workers. Table 2 presents the estimates. As the main focus of the paper involves the comparison of absence levels between natives and migrants and, furthermore, the assimilation of these levels as UK residency increases, only these core results are presented in the table.
[Table 2]
A common pattern can be observed in all the estimated models in Table 2, confirming the conclusions drawn from the descriptive analysis presented above: A8 migrants record substantially lower absence incidence and rates than natives. In particular, the A8 migrant sickness absence probability is 3.3 percentage points smaller than for an, observationally similar, UK national. Relative to the mean level of a UK national’s sickness absence probability (4.3 percent), this difference corresponds to a more than three times lower probability of absence for A8 migrants. Substantial (and of similar magnitude) differences are also estimated for the rest of the absence measures.
However, as mentioned above, owing to the presence of the interaction of the A8 dummy with the variable measuring the length of residence in the UK, the above differences correspond to the comparison of a UK national with an A8 migrant that arrived in the UK in the same year as the one observed in the QLFS. Evidence in favour of an assimilation pattern in work ethic is, thus, given by the positive and statistically significant coefficient of the interaction term in all estimated models. Specifically, the results indicate that the UK-A8 absence differential reduces in size with length of residency in the UK and becomes statistically insignificant after three or four years of residence, depending on the model. A similar pattern is observed in Figure 2, which plots the relevant coefficients and the corresponding confidence intervals from regression models with a more flexible functional form, where separate coefficients are estimated for A8 migrants for each year of length of residency observed in the data.¹⁰ The results here indicate that after 2-4 years in the UK, A8 migrants record similar levels of sickness and overall absence to observationally equivalent UK nationals.
[Figure 2]
Work Ethic and Labour Market Power
The migrant assimilation model suggests that migrants acquire UK-specific skills over the years following arrival, leading to the assimilation of migrant employment prospects and wages. While the data presented in Table A1 in the Appendix reveal that A8 migrants do indeed face a substantial wage penalty relative to natives despite their higher levels of education (reflecting their lower levels of labour market power), do the labour market outcomes of A8 migrants assimilate and, thus, help also explain the assimilation of the migrant work ethic? In addressing this question, the wage assimilation of migrants is now examined. It should be noted here that earnings are not the only indicator of migrants’ labour market assimilation. Previous studies (Chiswick et al., 1997; Clark and Lindley, 2009) have investigated the assimilation of migrants’ ability to find employment relative to natives. Wages are, however, likely to give a more complete picture, as earnings capture the quality of employment found by migrant workers.
Examining the wage assimilation of A8 migrants using the baseline sample presents, however, important technical difficulties. Owing to the availability of earnings information only for employees that are observed in their first (and fifth, which has been excluded from the analysis) wave in the QLFS, only around 25 percent of the cases in the baseline sample (about 29,000 observations) can be used for the study of wages. This seriously reduces the number of A8 migrants observed with earnings information (425 observations). For this reason, two relatively parsimonious model specifications are estimated in order to examine the wage assimilation of A8 migrants. The migrant variables are constructed now by splitting the A8 sample in only two groups, those with up to 3 years of residency in the UK and those with 4-8 years of residency. This is done to ensure that each group consists of a sufficient number of A8 migrants’ observations for the A8-UK wage gap to be precisely estimated. The dependent variable in both specifications is the log of the real hourly wage. In the first specification, the unadjusted wage gaps are estimated, including no further controls in the model apart from the two migrant dummies. However, since wages are determined by a number of factors that may themselves be correlated with migrant status or years of residency in the UK, the results from a multiple regression model of assimilation are also presented. This latter model assumes wages are determined by the following influences: gender, current age in quadratic form, marital status, education, health, and a set of survey year and region of residence dummy variables. Job characteristics such as industry and occupation are not included as these will capture part of the process through which A8 migrants increase their earnings.¹¹
Table 3 presents the results. It shows that newly arrived migrants (0-3 years in the UK) face a substantial wage penalty when compared to UK natives. Importantly, there is also some evidence of a reduction in this penalty, since the coefficient for migrants with longer UK residency (4-8 years) is smaller in (absolute) size, and significantly so. This result holds for both specifications.
[Table 3]
While A8 migrants’ wages may not have fully assimilated to those of UK natives, these migrants may also have assimilated in other unobservable ways which may help to explain the assimilation of the migrant work ethic. Firstly, migrants may culturally assimilate into their host nation, by adopting social norms and subsequently behaving more like natives. For example, the General Manager at MacKenzie and Forde’s (2009: 150) workplace study of ‘Glassfix’ stated that “There was a tail off in the Balkan staff, then all of a sudden there was an influx of Poles…50 percent of the accession nationalities are Poles. They are very good”, with the managing director agreeing that “they have a good work ethic”. However, as the Balkan staff had been in the UK for a longer period of time, the managing director of ‘Glassfix’ found that “The Balkan workers were sharper when it came to money and benefits, a lot of the Kosovans had been around a long time, they were more ‘Westernized’. They knew about benefits, knew it was better to draw off benefits – like the English.” In addition, Waldinger and Lichter (2003: 176) found that US managers reported that they felt African Americans were too “Americanized”, and thus more likely to demand higher wages and better conditions (see also Chiswick, 1978).
Secondly, migrant wage expectations may assimilate, consistent with the dual labour market hypothesis and the migrant ‘frame of reference’ (Piore, 1979). More specifically, suppose that everyone initially sets reservation wages with the belief that they will most likely earn the average of those with the same educational background and other observable characteristics. However, when migrants are added to the UK labour supply, their ‘frame of reference’ is usually the labour market in their home countries, meaning that their wage expectations are significantly lower than those of native workers. So, while recent A8 migrants face a substantial wage penalty relative to natives, wages may still remain significantly above expectations and may therefore be associated with higher worker effort according to a ‘fair wage-effort’ hypothesis (Akerlof and Yellen, 1990), which states that workers should withdraw effort if their actual wage falls short of what they consider a fair wage. This is especially likely for the most recent of A8 migrant workers who are less embedded in the UK labour market. Accordingly, as migrants’ experience and knowledge of the UK labour market increase, their ‘frame of reference’ is likely to shift and, as such, wage expectations will adjust accordingly.

Discussion and conclusions
The UK has experienced unprecedented increases in migration in recent years, primarily associated with the entry of the A8 accession countries into the EU. These migrant workers arriving in the UK have been praised by employers as having a stronger work ethic than native workers. Using worker absence data from the QLFS for the period 2005-2012, and considering migrants from the recent 2004 A8 expansion, this article provides quantitative evidence that substantiates these perceptions of this distinctive migrant work ethic. The key finding of this article is that A8 migrants record around three times lower worker absence than natives in their first year of residency in the UK. What is a particularly interesting result is that it takes migrants between 2 and 4 years to eradicate this difference.
It has been argued throughout this study that this migrant work ethic is a result of the lower levels of labour market power faced by this recent group of migrants, despite their higher levels of human capital, as evidenced through their higher qualification levels than UK natives (Wadsworth, 2015). In particular, low levels of English language proficiency see migrants moving into lower-skilled roles that are not customer facing, frequently on non-standard contracts and crowded into a small range of sectors (Hopkins and Dawson, 2016). It is this low labour market power that provides the incentive for migrant workers to exert increased effort through reduced absence, in order to signal to employers their underlying productivity. In line with this view and that of the traditional migrant assimilation model, it was proposed that the observed assimilation of the migrant work ethic would reflect the increasing levels of labour market power and employment prospects of more embedded migrants. Consistent with this, the modelling of the wage assimilation of A8 migrants suggested that these migrant workers face a substantial wage penalty relative to natives when first arriving in the UK, despite their higher levels of education. Importantly, this wage penalty was found to decline in magnitude as migrant residency in the UK increased. However, while A8 absence levels were found to fully assimilate to those of natives, wages do not. Migrants, thus, may have assimilated in other ways, particularly through adopting the social norms of natives or via converging wage expectations. It is left for future work to analyse whether A8 migrants do eventually assimilate in terms of their labour market outcomes, given a longer time frame.
While the evidence in this study points to the assimilation of migrant effort levels, there are, however, several limitations of the data that should be noted. Principally, the use of cross-sectional data in studies of migrant wage assimilation has been criticised owing to both cohort effects and the attrition of ‘below-average’ migrants (Borjas, 1985). The former criticism reflects the changing quality of migrants into the host nation. If, for example, there was an improvement in the quality of A8 migrants entering the UK over time, we may expect this to impact upon work effort levels observed in the sample. It does, however, seem unlikely that cohort effects are important within the context of this study, since only a short wave of migration is investigated. Furthermore, if ‘below-average’ A8 migrants are the first to return home, it is not obvious how this migrant attrition may bias the absence results. On the one hand, ‘better than average’ migrants may have more perseverance, which is likely to be associated with reduced absenteeism. On the other hand, ‘better than average’ migrants may be those that are more able to adapt their skill sets to the UK labour market and, therefore, will have a weaker incentive to signal to employers their underlying productivity through reduced absenteeism. Only with the use of appropriate longitudinal data, that can track effort convergence for particular migrants, could these methodological issues be addressed.¹²
If the estimates presented above are taken at face value, then our findings are in line with qualitative evidence based upon managers’ perceptions of the migrant work ethic. If managers use this information upon which to base their hiring decisions, then this may have negative implications for unusually productive native workers. These conditions seem likely to hold particularly in low-skilled, low-paying industries where employers regularly use deskilled work practices which demote the importance of English language proficiency. The raw data presented within this study (see Table A1 in the Appendix) report a large concentration of A8 migrants within elementary occupations, and therefore these migrants will be more likely to operate in roles where employers have a preference for a ‘good work ethic’ over more recognisable qualifications or skills (Matthews and Ruhs, 2007). While managers may distinguish among workers on the basis of readily available information such as nationality, the assimilation of the migrant work ethic, however, will lead employers to switch away from more established migrants towards newer groups. Indeed, findings from qualitative investigations of A8 migrant workers in the UK report managers stating that “We are looking forward to the next round of accession states” and “We’ll be picking up new nationalities” (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009: 149), showing that this perception of work ethic among different nationalities affects organisations’ recruitment behaviours (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009; Tannock, 2013). These findings imply that this form of ‘statistical discrimination’ may have adverse effects for native workers in the short run, but, importantly, this may only be a short run effect.

Endnotes

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Dr Chris Dawson is currently Associate Professor in Business Economics at the School of Management, University of Bath. He is a labour economist, with a focus on the causes and consequences of atypical employment. He has also undertaken research funded by the Low Pay Commission.

Dr Michail Veliziotis is currently a Lecturer in Human Resource Management within the Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. His areas of expertise include employment studies, employee relations, and applied statistics. His articles have appeared in journals such as the Economic and Industrial Democracy, European Journal of Industrial Relations, and The International Journal of HRM. He has also undertaken research funded by the Low Pay Commission and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Dr Benjamin Hopkins is Lecturer in Work and Employment at the University of Leicester. His research interests include non-permanent work, migration, and the causes and consequences of wage inequality.

Figure 1: Distribution of A8 Migrants by Years of Migrant Residency in the UK

Source: UK QLFS 2005-2012.

Table 1: Absence from work by nationality

Variable	UK Nationals	A8 Migrants
Sickness Absence Probability	0.043	0.024***
Sickness Absence Rate	0.031	0.018***
Overall Absence Probability	0.053	0.028***
Overall Absence Rate	0.034	0.019***
Observations	112,408	1,396
Source: UK QLFS 2005-2012. Notes: Numbers in table are sample means; *** t-test significant at 1%.