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Abstract

Today, the duration of jobs held by men is substantially lower than prior to the 1990s. An increase in women's job tenure has masked that decrease in job stability for men, a pattern called “masked instability.” In this paper, we contribute to the masked instability literature by focusing on differences in job stability trends between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. We are specifically interested in differences stemming from employment dynamics among immigrant mothers and fathers, which has received limited attention in research on job instability. We use data from the United Kingdom's Labour Force Survey (LFS) from 1992 to 2023 to conduct a disaggregated analysis comparing the evolution of the job tenure of immigrant and non-immigrant mothers and fathers from various ethnic groups. We find that white non-immigrant mothers experienced the highest increase in job tenure, converging with the job tenure level of white non-immigrant fathers. Meanwhile, immigrant mothers from most ethnic groups did not experience the same increase in job tenure, leading to persisting gaps in job stability relative to white non-immigrant mothers and fathers. This is especially true for Black immigrant mothers. Finally, we find a decrease in job tenure duration among immigrant fathers of all ethnicities and white non-immigrant fathers. Our findings illustrate how the rise of flexible employment practices has impacted the job stability of racialized immigrant mothers and fathers in the UK and highlight the importance of studying career instability for immigration scholars.

Keywords

job stability tenure immigration ethnicity precarious work intersectionality

Introduction

Empirical studies documenting trends in various measures of job stability over the last few decades show that job stability decreased for men in Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) such as the US, the UK, Canada, and Ireland (Farber 2010; Gregg and Wadsworth 2002; Molloy, Smith and Wozniak 2024; Neumark, Polsky and Hansen 1999; St-Denis 2023a; St-Denis and Hollister 2023, 2024). This trend unfolded in the context of two transformations in the world of work. First, an increased reliance on non-standard work arrangements exposed workers to greater insecurity and risk of job loss, a trend associated with the concept of precarious employment (Kalleberg 2009). Second, in a context of employers seeking greater levels of flexibility and offering fewer opportunities for career progression within a single firm, employees adopted inter-firm mobility as a career model (Hall 1996; Stone 2006). In this paper, we ask how these transformations have influenced the job stability of immigrant men and women in the UK.

The recent literature on trends in job instability in LMEs produced a puzzling finding: the emergence of a “masked instability” pattern of change (Hollister and Smith 2014). Men experienced a decrease in job tenure duration (the number of years since an employee started working continuously for their current employer), as expected. In contrast, women's job tenure duration increased, meaning that their career mobility patterns evolved in the opposite direction. This trend is primarily driven by married mothers as they became increasingly attached to employment since the 1980s, especially after childbirth (Baker and Milligan 2008; Gregg, Gutiérrez-Domènech and Waldfogel 2007).

One key shortcoming of the masked instability perspective is that it considers the overall workforce, and in particular mothers, as a relatively homogenous group. This is a consequential omission because the experiences and patterns of job instability differ greatly for immigrant men and women. First, occupational change, often achieved through voluntary inter-firm mobility, is an important building bloc of upward economic mobility trajectories of immigrants (Chiswick, Lee and Miller 2005), likely more so than among non-immigrants. It is not clear whether the current decrease in job stability among men has exacerbated the job mobility of immigrants or has instead led to a convergence. Second, immigrant women often arrive as tied movers (Banerjee and Phan 2015), which may represent an important obstacle to stable employment throughout their career. It is possible that immigrant women were prevented from experiencing an increase in job stability in comparison with non-immigrant women due to the persistence of tied-movers dynamics in recent decades.

In addition, immigrants and their descendants often belong to racialized ethnic minority groups. Racialized workers, especially women and first-generation immigrants, have a higher prevalence of precarious employment (Fuller and Vosko 2008; Li and Heath 2016). This disparity in exposure to precarious employment puts racialized workers at greater risk of job loss. For that reason, racialized immigrant workers may have experienced a stronger rise in job instability over the last decades, with racialized immigrant women again being prevented from experiencing the increase in job stability discussed above.

The impact of these dynamics on the job instability of immigrants has not been thoroughly investigated. No existing study has produced results on change over time in the job stability of immigrants in the UK or elsewhere, even less so at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. In contrast, many other dimensions of the employment experience of racialized immigrant men and women have received sustained attention, such as employment and earnings gaps (Adsera and Chiswick 2007; Dustmann and Fabbri 2005), occupational mobility (Banerjee and Phan 2015; Chiswick, Lee and Miller 2005), or precarious work (an ex ante risk, associated with job insecurity, as opposed to job instability, a career outcome or feature observed ex post) (Fuller 2011). While the masked instability literature provides a framework to understand the overall evolution of job stability over the last few decades, it remains unclear to what extent this framework applies to trends in job instability among immigrant men and women.

Our paper seeks to fill this empirical gap by asking whether the evolution of job instability over the last 30 years in the UK varies between immigrant and non-immigrant fathers and mothers. We also document how these trends vary by ethnic groups to take into account the specific experiences of different racialized immigrant groups and their descendants, in particular Black and South Asian workers.

We select the UK as a case study because it is one of the few countries with readily available data on job stability since the 1990s for the groups we are investigating. Studying the UK allows us to make some generalizations about other LMEs such as the US and Canada. These countries share similar labor market institutions and social policies; they experienced similar social and political transformations over the last few decades (Emmenegger 2014; Hall and Soskice 2001). Importantly, masked instability trends have been observed across LMEs (Farber 2010; Gregg and Wadsworth 2002; Hollister and Smith 2014; St-Denis 2023a; St-Denis and Hollister 2023, 2024).

Using Labour Force Survey (LFS) data from 1992 to 2023, our paper features two main findings. First, immigrant fathers experienced a similar decrease in job tenure duration to white non-immigrant fathers. In addition, non-immigrant fathers racialized as Black experienced a large decrease (three years) in average job tenure from 1992 to 2023, and a persistent job tenure gap with white non-immigrant fathers. Second, white non-immigrant mothers have experienced an increase in average job tenure duration of several years over our period of study while Black immigrant and non-immigrant mothers experienced a decrease in job stability. No change is observed for other immigrant and non-immigrant mothers. In addition, most groups of racialized immigrant mothers have a lower average job tenure relative to white non-immigrant mothers and fathers by 2022–2023 while it was higher in the early 1990s.

The rest of this paper is divided as follows. First, we summarize the literature on job instability at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. We derive hypotheses that account for heterogeneities between different ethnic groups, including two of the largest ethnic minority groups in the UK labor force: Black and South Asian workers. Second, we describe our data and methods. Third, we present our results. Finally, we conclude the paper and discuss the implications of our findings for the future of intersectional research on career trajectories and job instability.

Job Instability Trends in LMEs

Research on trends in job stability has emerged in the context of growing labor market insecurity in the 1980s and early 1990s (Kalleberg 2009). At the time, increased layoff rates, corporate restructuring, outsourcing, and the growing use of non-standard employment contracts motivated researchers to explore the influence of this shift towards flexible employment on career trajectories (Cappelli 1999; Osterman 1996).

Moreover, several contributions discussed how these transformations created incentives for voluntary inter-firm mobility as a career progression strategy among workers who could not expect the same level of internal mobility and job security they used to experience (Arthur 1994; Hall 1996). Today, there is a growing agreement that trends in job stability are likely to be driven by these voluntary mobility dynamics to at least the same extent as changes in rates of involuntary job loss (St-Denis 2023b). For example, the layoff rate has shifted little in Canada from the 1970s to the 2000s (Morissette, Qiu and Chan 2013); there is evidence that employers shifting towards pension plans that are more favorable to inter-firm mobility is linked to an increase in voluntary quits (Fang and Messacar 2019); and transferable human capital is valued by firms of the knowledge economy, enabling employee mobility (Stone 2006).¹

Empirical contributions primarily focused on aggregate trends in job stability usually remain skeptical that flexibilization translated into any meaningful shift towards job instability at the national level (Goulart and Oesch 2024; Hyatt and Spletzer 2016; Molloy et al. 2016). However, more careful, disaggregated analyses have established a few basic facts that provide strong support for the idea that the stability of jobs held by workers throughout their career has decreased. First, men, especially younger men, appear to experience increased probabilities of job separation (St-Denis and Hollister 2024). Likewise, they accumulate job tenure at lower rates since the 1980s (Farber 2010; Hollister and Smith 2014; Molloy, Smith and Wozniak 2024; St-Denis and Hollister 2024). Second, older workers usually have more stable jobs and represent an increasingly large share of the workforce, pushing overall job stability upward, but job stability decreased within most age groups (Bachmann and Felder 2018; Cazes and Tonin 2010; Molloy, Smith and Wozniak 2024; St-Denis 2023a; St-Denis and Hollister 2024). That is, the compositional effect of workforce aging is pushing the job tenure distribution upward, but individual careers appear to have become less stable since the 1980s across OECD countries. Third, the increased attachment of mothers to the labor force appears to have driven an increase in job tenure duration among women, a trend opposite to that of men (Gregg, Gutiérrez-Domènech and Waldfogel 2007; Molloy, Smith and Wozniak 2024; St-Denis and Hollister 2023, 2024). This pattern of change has been called “masked instability” (Hollister and Smith 2014).²

In sum, the literature largely focuses on trends over time at a relatively aggregated level and the demographic shifts underpinning them. However, not all population groups have been impacted by growing labor market insecurity and the rise of inter-firm mobility as a career model. Our paper argues that the dynamics driving job mobility and instability among immigrant men and women, in particular racialized immigrants, are different from non-immigrants. Consequently, we hypothesize that trends in job stability will vary between men and women with different immigration statuses and belonging to different ethnic groups.

Differences in Job Stability by Immigration Status and Ethnicity

In the sections below, we review relevant research that helps us derive hypotheses about trends in job instability among racialized and non-racialized immigrant workers in the UK. We use the term “racialized” to identify workers whose phenotypical, cultural, or other traits³ are invoked in a social process of categorization, discrimination, and exclusion (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Omi and Winant 2014). In the UK context, racialized identities are generally operationalized using an “ethnicity” variable (Aspinall 2002), and we use the two terms interchangeably.

At the same time, we avoid treating all racialized immigrants and their descendants as a homogenous group since ethnic groups are racialized in culturally specific ways, such as Muslim South Asians in the UK (Modood 2005). For that reason, we discuss evidence pertaining to specific ethnic groups in the sections below in order to set the stage for our disaggregated analysis. We also distinguish between (first-generation) immigrants and non-immigrants (second-generation or more) of different ethnicities. Indeed, while racialized non-immigrant workers will share an experience of labor market discrimination with racialized immigrants, some dynamics influencing job stability are specific to first-generation immigrants, such as being a tied mover.

Do Immigrants Experience Greater Job Instability?

Are immigrant workers in the UK more likely to experience greater job instability than non-immigrants? The literature provides several reasons why this would be the case. First, racialized immigrants (and non-immigrants) are over-represented in precarious employment in the UK (Clark and Ochmann 2022; Zwysen and Demireva 2020) such as temporary and part-time work (Dustmann and Fabbri 2005). Another reason is the possibly greater propensity for inter-firm mobility of immigrants in search of improved job matches (Hall, Greenman and Yi 2019) as they acquire country-specific experience and language skills. Indeed, immigrants are especially likely to experience various forms of mismatch between their skills and those required by their occupation (Banerjee, Verma and Zhang 2019), creating incentives for occupational mobility as part of the process of economic integration.

From another perspective, we may expect racialized workers (immigrant or not) to experience greater job stability because of more restricted job mobility opportunities. For example, hiring discrimination (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004) and residential concentration in areas with lower employment opportunities as well as homogenous and limited ethnic networks (Longhi 2020; Mok and Platt 2020) may restrict opportunities for voluntary job mobility available to racialized workers. This immobility should result in greater job stability. Note that hiring discrimination may instead have an opposite, negative effect on job stability by lengthening unemployment spells⁴, therefore preventing racialized workers from accumulating job tenure.

Turning to the empirical literature focusing specifically on the job stability of immigrants, we do have some indications that immigrants experience lower job stability than non-immigrant workers in the UK. Several analyses rely on annual job transition rates from longitudinal data to provide relevant evidence. Reyneri and Fullin (2011) rely on a retrospective employment question featured in the 2004 UK LFS. They find that immigrants from non-EU15 countries had higher rates of transition from employment to unemployment (E-U) and lower rates of transition from unemployment to employment (U-E) than non-immigrants. In this case, a higher probability of E-U transition implies that job tenure is more likely to be interrupted (and reset to zero). Likewise, a lower probability of exit from unemployment (U-E) means less time spent accumulating tenure as an employee. In both cases, this should translate into shorter job tenure durations.

South Asian and Black workers drive these higher E-U and lower U-E transition rates to some extent. Using the quarterly panels of the 1992–2008 UK LFS, Demireva and Kesler (2011) find higher E-U transition rates among South Asian and Black immigrants than non-immigrants, and lower U-E transition rates (but not for other immigrant groups, once accounting for observable characteristics). Estimates based on the UKHLS (2009-2015) show no differences in E-U transition rates by ethnicity and immigration status, but lower U-E transition rates for some South Asian men and for Black Caribbean immigrant women (Longhi 2020).

Relatedly, US data documenting how job flow patterns differ by race and immigration status suggests that minorities do bear the brunt of involuntary job losses during recessions specifically. US immigrants were more likely to experience involuntary job loss during the Great Recession (Tamborini and Villarreal 2021)⁵. They were more likely to be terminated than white workers, but also more likely to exit unemployment in the aftermaths of the recession (Xu 2018). Tracking the fluctuation in cross-sectional employment rates over time for immigrants of different ethnicities, Dustmann and Fabbri (2005) suggest that similar patterns can be found in the UK, but no comparable UK job transitions data has been published.

The above evidence of higher E-U and job loss rates among Black and South Asian immigrants in the UK are consistent with the precarious work literature on the greater job insecurity of immigrants. The evidence of lower exits from non-employment (lower U-E rates) in the UK also hints at the role of hiring discrimination in job transitions. However, these data on employment status transitions are insufficient since they offer only a partial view of job instability among immigrants. In fact, none of these studies integrate measures of inter-firm mobility, even if voluntary employer changes are a key driver of job instability in the current labor market, as argued earlier, especially for immigrants.

Other measures such as average job tenure duration, which we use in this study, are more likely to capture all sources of job instability. We could not find any study of immigrant job stability from the UK or other LMEs using those more complete measures.⁶ A large gap therefore remains in the literature, which we intend to fill with our analysis. In other words, this paper aims to test the following hypothesis:

H1: Job stability is lower for immigrants.

In addition, none of the studies above produce evidence of change over time. We discuss this other important gap in the subsection below.

Change Over Time in the Job Stability of UK Immigrants and Non-Immigrants

The theoretical questioning underpinning our paper is whether exposure to precarious work and to incentives for voluntary inter-firm mobility evolve differently over the last few decades for immigrants and non-immigrants, which would translate into different job stability trends. On the one hand, some contributions argue that racialized and immigrant workers have been particularly exposed to the growth of precarious work (Clark and Ochmann 2022; Fuller and Vosko 2008). In this case, we would expect a stronger increase in job instability among these groups. On the other hand, we have no evidence of how exposure to various drivers of inter-firm mobility may have evolved over time for immigrants and non-immigrants. Specifically, it is unclear whether the shift towards a new career model (based on transferable human capital and changes in compensation and pension structures, as mentioned earlier) lead to a convergence in job instability between non-immigrant and immigrant workers.⁷

When it comes to analyses of change over time, the existing empirical literature is scarce and limited: no study of change over time in job stability comparing immigrants and non-immigrants exists. Some studies focus on Black and Hispanic workers (no distinction by immigration status), but in the US context. In their influential study of trends in job stability in the US, Neumark, Polsky and Hansen (1999) find a relatively small decline in job stability, measured by retention rates, for both Black and white men (the two only racial groups for which results are reported in the paper) between the early 1980s and the early 1990s. The decline was more important for Black men. In contrast, the retention rate increased slightly for white women (in line with the masked instability theory developed later) but decreased for Black women. Using US data from 1996 to 2020, Lachanski (2025) shows that Hispanic workers do not experience a stable job stability advantage or disadvantage over time.

We are not aware of any other study that investigated such differences in the UK or other LMEs. In addition, we are not aware of any study of change over time in job stability for immigrants specifically. Given the general lack of theory and empirical evidence on the evolution of job stability by immigration status in LMEs, our paper addresses an important shortcoming in the literature. We test a second general hypothesis:

H2: Immigrants experienced a greater decrease in job stability than non-immigrants.

Job Stability Trends at the Intersection of Gender, Immigration Status, and Ethnicity

A key feature of the literature on job instability is the different trends for men and women (Hollister and Smith 2014; St-Denis and Hollister 2023, 2024). Consequently, our paper also addresses the absence of evidence on whether immigrant and non-immigrant women belonging to different ethnic groups experienced the same increase in job stability as white non-immigrant women. The next section narrows in on the factors that may lead us to expect trends of different directions or magnitude.

Societal Trends and Expected Change in Job Stability for Immigrant Women

We are expecting to find a weaker growth of average job tenure duration for racialized immigrant and non-immigrant women relative to non-immigrant white women. In this section, we identify three possible sources for this hypothesized pattern. These three factors are likely to counteract other social and institutional shifts driving the increasing strength of the labor force attachment and increased job tenure duration of UK women. Remember that job tenure duration, our measure of job stability, will be longer for workers who are expecting lower job separation rates and shorter jobless spells (for a discussion on this relationship, see St-Denis and Hollister 2024).

Non-Standard Work Arrangements

First, non-standard employment contracts associated with greater job insecurity are more prevalent among racialized immigrant and non-immigrant women than other groups (Fuller and Vosko 2008). In the UK, women from multiple ethnic groups, especially Black and South Asian women, have lower quality jobs compared to non-racialized women (Zwysen and Demireva 2020) and higher rates of temporary employment contracts (Dustmann and Fabbri 2005). In other words, an increase in precarious employment among racialized women may have prevented gains in job stability,⁸ in contrast with white non-immigrant women whose increase in job stability would instead have been driven by a decrease in part-time work (St-Denis and Hollister 2023).

Tied-Mover Dynamics

Second, differences may also be driven by intra-family dynamics in immigrant households. While the integration of first-generation immigrants into the labor market is long and uncertain regardless of gender, this is especially the case of immigrant women, who take longer to achieve career stability than men. Among families of economic immigrants, women tend to take on the responsibility for unpaid care work as tied movers and maintain weaker or more precarious attachment to employment (Banerjee and Phan 2015; Elitok and Nawyn 2023; Elrick and Lightman 2016; Fuller 2015). This translates into lower employment rates for non-Western/non-white immigrant women relative to UK-born women and immigrant men in Europe, with this gap being among the largest in the UK (Kanas and Steinmetz 2021). Pakistani and Bangladeshi women experience particularly large employment and participation penalties (Dustmann and Fabbri 2005). This tied-movers dynamic resulting in low employment appears to have persisted over time, representing an obstacle to the accumulation of seniority and the achievement of job stability by immigrant women today just as in previous decades. It may counteract the influence of societal and policy changes driving the increase of job tenure duration for non-immigrant women and prevent immigrant women from experiencing the same increase.⁹

Cultural Norms, Historical Context, and Employment Participation

Finally, cultural factors may play an important role. The masked instability literature emphasizes the role of changing norms regarding the employment participation of mothers as a driver of the observed increase in job stability among women over the 1990s (Hollister and Smith 2014). In the UK and Canada, the probability of career interruption among women after childbirth decreased following the implementation of relatively generous maternal leave policies and job-protected leave legislations (Baker and Milligan 2008; Gregg, Gutiérrez-Domènech and Waldfogel 2007). In the US however, it also increased despite much less supportive family policies. This trend is instead attributed to shifting norms regarding the labor force attachment of mothers (Hollister and Smith 2014). Here, we argue that different norms may prevail across groups of immigrant workers in the UK. Their persistence over time may influence immigrant women's job stability trends.

Norms may differ across ethnic groups depending on the historical context of immigrant cohorts. Large numbers of Black women who immigrated from the Caribbeans in the 1950s and 1960s were economic immigrants who came looking for employment (Dale and Holdsworth 1998; Kofman et al. 2000). They also faced higher rates of lone parenthood and low-wage male employment that incentivized employment among partnered mothers. These two factors may have influenced the propensity to work across generations of Black women in the UK: research does find an employment gap in favor of Black relative to white women in starting from the 1990s (Dale and Holdsworth 1998). For that reason, we are expecting that Black women will have greater job stability than white women at the beginning of our period of observation (the early 1990s). However, research finds similar employment rates in the early 2000s (Dustmann and Fabbri 2005) and employment penalties in recent years (Clark and Shankley 2020). We expect that the job tenure advantage for Black women will close or even reverse with the combined influence of increased labor force participation of white women and the rise of precarious/insecure jobs impacting Black women.

Our expectations for other groups of racialized immigrant women are different. We hypothesize that Bangladeshi and Pakistani women are unlikely to achieve levels of job stability comparable to Black women in the early 1990s for two reasons. First, there was a notable surge in immigration from Bangladesh to the UK during the 1980s, but in this case, male workers were joined by their spouses through family reunification (Dale and Holdsworth 1998; Kofman et al. 2000). Second, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women are predominantly Muslim, a community that experiences hostility and labor market discrimination (Drouhot and Nee 2019; Khattab and Modood 2015). Muslim women in the UK are also more likely to adopt strongly gendered attitudes and divisions of labor (Dale and Holdsworth 1998; Khattab et al. 2010). The persistence of both the cultural norms related to women's employment in predominantly Muslim immigrant groups and the discrimination they experience in employment is likely to counteract the influence of cultural norms in favor of mothers’ employment that emerged over the last decades and drove the increase in women's job stability in the UK. This is consistent with findings of higher unemployment rates and lower participation of Muslim women in the UK (Daoud and Khattab 2022) and Europe more generally (Kanas and Müller 2021).

On the other hand, South Asian women of Indian ethnicity, who are predominantly non-Muslim, are unlikely to face the same challenges. Besides cultural explanations focusing on religious norms, other authors emphasize that Indian immigration occurred in an earlier period that facilitated the labor market integration of women relative to later cohorts of South Asian immigration to the UK (Bruegel 1989). Indian couples have the highest rate of dual full-time earners than any racialized group in the UK, pointing to the possible existence of less traditional norms in those couples (Dex and Ward 2010).

In summary, we hypothesize that:

H3. Black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani (but not Indian) immigrant and non-immigrant women experienced an increase in job tenure duration of smaller size than non-immigrant white women.

H4. Black immigrant and non-immigrant women had higher average job tenure than other women at the beginning of our observation period in the 1990s.

A Disaggregated Approach to the Study of Trends in Job Instability

In the paragraphs above, we presented different reasons why job stability levels and trends may differ between men and women in the UK based on their immigration status and specific ethnic group (rather than a broad grouping of all racialized workers). In the following section, we introduce an empirical approach based on disaggregated analysis that will allow us to test our hypotheses.

We argue that the influence of gender, immigration status, and ethnicity on our outcome of interest does not operate in an additive manner, meaning that each variable should not simply be considered as independent. Instead, we draw on insights from “intercategorical multigroup” intersectional research (McCall 2005) and produce results for all groups of workers belonging to a unique configuration of gender, immigration status, and ethnicity as well as parenthood. Such “multiplicative” or “compounding” empirical approach to quantitative intersectional research (Hancock 2007; Heiserman 2023) builds on seminal contributions in intersectional theory arguing that the experience of racialized women is not simply the combination of gender and race “effects” as independent axes of discrimination, but a complex context-specific interaction of these overlapping dimensions (Crenshaw 1989; King 1988).

This approach will allow us to answer our research question: Are racialized immigrant and non-immigrant men and women experiencing the great shift in job stability observed in the overall population differently than non-racialized and non-immigrant men and women? Given the importance of motherhood in masked instability theory, we will also distinguish mothers and fathers from childless workers.

Data and Methods

We use data from the United Kingdom's LFS from 1992 to 2023, second quarter (April–June). Since 1992, the survey has included a question with the same wording on continuous years of work with their current employer. Previous research shows that despite certain limitations, job tenure is a reliable measure of job (in)stability in studies focusing on change over time (see appendix in St-Denis and Hollister 2024). Indeed, job tenure accumulation is interrupted by past job separations, making job tenure duration a useful measure of changes in job stability.¹⁰

Another significant advantage of this dataset is its detailed data on ethnicity and years since the arrival of immigrants. With over 100,000 observations per quarter, we can conduct a disaggregated analysis that considers characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, and immigration status, essential to our intersectional approach (see Table 1 for subgroup observation counts). We have re-coded the data in a way that harmonizes these categories over the decades. We re-coded the ethnicity variables into five disaggregated groups: white/non-racialized, Black, Indian, Pakistani & Bangladeshi, and other non-white ethnicities.¹¹ We separated the biggest groups from South Asia into two because the literature shows differences across a broad range of outcomes for these groups (Dale and Holdsworth 1998; Dex and Ward 2010; Dustmann and Fabbri 2005; Li and Heath 2016; Zuccotti and Platt 2023). Due to the LFS's inconsistent coding of Black African and Black Caribbean ethnicities along the years, we decided to pool both groups into a single Black category while being conscious that doing so may mask difference between those two groups in our analysis. In Appendix B, we report results separately for Black Caribbean workers based on a subsample excluding Scotland to have a consistent category from 1992 to 2023 for the Black Caribbean ethnicity. Table B1 reports observation counts for that subsample.

Table 1.

Sample Observation Count by Gender, Immigration Status, and Ethnicity, 1992–2023.

	1992–1993	1994–1995	1996–1997	1998–1999	2000–2001	2002–2003	2004–2005	2006–2007	2008–2009	2010–2011	2012–2013	2014–2015	2016–2017	2018–2019	2020–2021	2022–2023
	Fathers
White
Born in UK	18,439	18,399	18,167	17,641	16,745	15,539	14,040	13,062	11,845	10,589	10,168	98,21	89,69	85,67	7,373	5,226
Born outside of UK	750	738	760	788	776	752	689	822	870	843	1028	1177	1232	1169	826	682
Black
Born in UK	60	66	117	121	144	127	132	145	132	95	93	81	85	63	43	42
Born outside of UK	156	136	162	163	190	188	164	220	234	264	240	253	294	235	189	187
Indian
Born in UK	25	35	34	65	64	86	82	71	98	118	134	138	144	135	130	118
Born outside of UK	385	331	367	316	303	309	292	289	312	330	334	350	335	334	252	251
Pakistani & Bangladeshi
Born in UK	3	13	27	36	31	51	47	57	98	95	95	125	107	134	79	79
Born outside of UK	165	171	213	221	239	226	232	224	252	254	260	301	270	265	172	150
Other
Born in UK	8	18	20	19	17	39	59	61	54	93	117	103	111	126	114	102
Born outside of UK	186	174	159	197	200	279	301	425	415	411	495	495	442	378	263	299
Total fathers	20,177	20,081	20,026	19,567	18,709	17,596	16,038	15,376	14,310	13,092	12,964	12,844	11,989	11,406	9,441	7,136
	Mothers
White
Born in UK	17,231	17,926	18,190	18,159	17,908	17,020	15,823	15,023	14,006	12,586	12,109	11,581	10,526	10,232	8,660	6,177
Born outside of UK	720	737	757	823	801	746	781	802	891	966	1,122	1,279	1,409	1,452	1,096	9,11
Black
Born in UK	107	141	192	206	236	260	242	245	217	184	162	159	156	127	102	61
Born outside of UK	212	209	223	244	206	229	257	296	301	310	356	374	406	378	279	253
Indian
Born in UK	16	33	40	68	76	100	104	113	101	123	122	151	151	154	147	106
Born outside of UK	321	322	300	291	260	278	236	248	277	282	310	295	264	287	217	242
Pakistani & Bangladeshi
Born in UK	9	11	17	30	28	45	46	52	72	78	81	109	124	125	97	84
Born outside of UK	39	52	43	56	72	58	54	57	74	89	93	100	114	121	91	86
Other
Born in UK	17	19	34	27	38	53	60	76	68	79	138	163	185	182	149	144
Born outside of UK	142	140	161	190	167	218	268	363	380	381	430	436	464	425	349	349
Total mothers	18,814	19,590	19,957	20,094	19,792	19,007	17,871	17,275	16,387	15,078	14,923	14,647	13,799	13,483	11,187	8,413
Total observations	38,991	39,671	39,983	39,661	38,501	36,603	33,909	32,651	30,697	28,170	27,887	27,491	25,788	24,889	20,628	15,549

Note: Unweighted observation counts.

We use multivariate linear regressions (ordinary least squares) to estimate the evolution of average job tenure. Our analysis includes all employees aged 25 to 55 (the tenure question does not apply to self-employed workers). We start our sample at 25 years of age to minimize the chances of having respondents that are still pursuing their studies and limit the sample to 55 years of age to avoid the influence of retirement on job stability patterns. Since we are specifically interested in masked instability patterns, we also restrict our sample to mothers and fathers. Results for non-mothers and non-fathers are reported in Online Appendix A and B respectively, and results for a sample restricted to 30–45 years old parents appear in Online Appendix B.

To estimate change over time in average job tenure for each group across the decades, we regress job tenure duration (in years), $T_{i}$ , on a set of period dummies, $P_{t}$ , with t = 1992–1993 set as the reference period. A positive coefficient for a given year indicates an increase in job tenure compared with 1992–1993, whereas a negative coefficient signals a decrease in tenure. Our models interact these period dummies with gender-immigration-ethnicity group dummies, $G_{k}$ , to produce group-specific trends (the reference group for k is white non-immigrant fathers). Each group, k, is a unique configuration of gender, immigration status (yes/no), and ethnicity (detailed). We report our results in two ways. First, we report the change over time in average job tenure relative to the baseline period separately for each gender-immigration-ethnicity group; second, we plot the gap in average job tenure duration between white fathers and each of the other groups by period. In each case, we hold all other covariates at the sample mean.

We estimate two sets of models: a model controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, $S$ (potential labor force experience (PLFE), region, marital status, number of children and education), and a model also controlling for job characteristics, $J$ (firm size, a dummy for part-time employment, and a dummy for temporary employment contract). Our fully specified model is the following ordinary least square regression model with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors:

T_{i t} = β_{0} + β_{1 t} P_{t} + β_{2 k} G_{k, i} + β_{3 t k} P_{t} \times G_{k, i} + S θ + J η + ϵ_{i t}

$ϵ_{i t}$ is a random term assumed to have a mean of zero and a normal distribution. The first set of controls, S , captures shifts that may drive trends in job instability while not being directly related to precarious employment or changing career progression strategies. For example, population aging may drive average job tenure upwards even as job tenure within every age group decreases over time (St-Denis 2023a). Likewise, changes in the size of immigrant arrival cohorts may drive fluctuations in job tenure, with the arrival of large cohorts of immigrants likely to mechanically drive the job tenure distribution downwards only because new immigrants did not have time to accumulate any work experience that may translate into job tenure, regardless of their age. For example, around 20 percent of 55-year-old workers in the late 2010s in the UK had accumulated over 30 years of job tenure (St-Denis 2021). No immigrant who arrived in the UK after 25 years of age is able to reach that threshold, even if they hold a single job for their whole career in the UK. In order to make sure that this mechanical driver of trends in job tenure duration does not influence our trend estimates, we control for PLFE, calculated as the maximum number of years a worker could have potentially been employed in the UK. For UK-born individuals, the value is set depending on their highest level of study. For foreign-born individuals, the value is set as time elapsed since the year of arrival in the UK if that value is shorter than the other value (see Online Appendix C for details).¹²

In contrast, the second set of controls, J , allows us to test for the influence of a key mechanism discussed in our review of the literature: whether the observed trends are accounted for by shifts towards precarious employment. Note that we use cross-sectional survey weights for all estimations.

Evolution of the Ethnic and Gender Composition of the UK Workforce

In this section, we describe our sample of employees. Figure 1 focuses on the changing ethnic distribution of the UK workforce from 1992 to 2023. In 1992–1993, around 95 percent of the workforce was white, with Indian and Black workers being the largest ethnic groups. Together, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers represented less than one percent of the workforce. The proportion of non-white workers increased, especially after 2000–2001. The share of workers with ethnicities other than Black or South Asian grew steadily, but the proportion of Black, Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi remained significant, each representing close to a quarter of all non-white workers.

Figure 1.

Ethnicity distribution of employees. Panel A: non-white, Panel B: white.

This change in the ethnic composition of the UK workforce occurred in parallel with changes in the immigration background of non-white workers. In Figure 2, we find a decrease in the share of non-white workers born outside of the UK except for Black workers, for whom the proportion decreases slightly in the 1990s before increasing from the early 2000s onwards. This suggests a new wave of migration influencing the ethnic composition of the workforce in addition to the rising share of descendants of immigrants. For Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi workers, the decrease is concentrated in the 1992–1993 to the 2005-2006 period approximately. That said, the proportion of workers from these groups born outside of the UK remains between 60 and 70 percent until 2022–2023. Finally, we also find an increase in the share of white workers born outside of the UK starting after 2004–2005, around the expansion of the EU and Schengen to Eastern Europe.

Figure 2.

Proportion of employees born outside of the UK by ethnicity.

Finally, Figure 3 shows the employment rate of women by immigration status and ethnicity from 1992 to 2023. As expected, the employment rate of white non-immigrant mothers increased steadily from 65 to 80 percent approximately. It also increased from around 60 percent to 80 percent for other groups of racialized non-immigrant mothers (Black, Indian, and other). As expected, the employment rate of non-immigrant Pakistani and Bangladeshi mothers was well below that of other groups. It also did not converge with that of other groups of non-immigrant mothers although we observe a sharp increase from 2007/2011 to 2018/2023. For immigrant mothers, we find much more limited increases in employment rates, concentrated in the 2007/2011 to 2018/2023 period rather than the 1990s and early 2000s, suggesting that not all groups were equally impacted by changing norms and behaviors regarding the employment participation of mothers. Contrary to our expectations, Black mothers (immigrant or not) have similar baseline employment rates to other racialized mothers and lower rates relative to white non-immigrant mothers. The extent of the relationship between these changing gendered employment participation patterns and trends on job instability for each group of immigrant workers is unclear.

Figure 3.

Employment rate of mothers by ethnicity and immigration status, 25–54 years old.

Estimates of Trends in Job Stability by Gender, Immigration Status, and Ethnicity

In this section, we report adjusted estimates of trends in job tenure duration. Figures 4 to 7 are based on the regression equation from the previous section.¹³ Our final analytical sample contains 500,885 observations. Our interpretation focuses primarily on estimates from model 1, adjusting for PLFE as well as key sociodemographic characteristics. Importantly, focusing on these adjusted estimates ensures that the results are not driven by shifts in the sociodemographic composition of the population (in particular, aging), which are not directly related to the rise of precarious employment and the adoption of flexible employment practices by employers, but do influence average job tenure duration. They provide estimates of whether, at the same stage of their life course and net of differences in other sociodemographic characteristics, workers have accumulated shorter or longer job tenure durations on average in the 2020s relative to the early 1990s.

Figure 4.

Change in average job tenure of fathers by ethnicity and immigration status.

Figure 5.

Difference in average job tenure of fathers relative to white non-immigrant fathers.

Figure 6.

Change in average job tenure of mothers by ethnicity and immigration status.

Figure 7.

Difference in average job tenure of mothers relative to white non-immigrant fathers.

In the Online Appendix, Figures A1-A4 compare a baseline unadjusted model (model 1) with models adjusting for various sociodemographic controls.¹⁴ A comparison with model 2 of these appendix tables (controlling for age) shows that population aging is driving average job tenure upwards over time for non-immigrants mothers and fathers (racialized or not). Meanwhile, a comparison with model 3 (controlling for PLFE, which also takes into account change in the average number of years since arrival for immigrants) shows that the rising share of recent immigrants has pulled average job tenure downwards over time. These results are consistent with our expectations that broad demographic shifts can bias our results if not controlled for. Other sociodemographic controls have inconsistent and more minor impacts across groups.

Fathers

We first focus on fathers. Figure 4 reports the change in average job tenure duration relative to the baseline period (1992–1993), plotting group-specific predicted values (corresponding to ${\hat{β}}_{1 t} + {\hat{β}}_{3 t k}$ in our regression equation) and 95 percent confidence intervals. In brief, model 1 values show a net decrease of one to two years for all immigrant fathers, concentrated in the first decade of data (1992–1993 to 2002–2003). As shown by the confidence intervals, this decrease is statistically significant at the 5 percent level (the same applies to all other estimates). After that point, the trend remains relatively flat.¹⁵ We find a similar trend for white non-immigrant fathers.¹⁶ No decrease is found for racialized non-immigrant fathers, except for Black non-immigrant fathers, who experience a decrease of three years by 2022–2023, the largest of all groups.

Next, model 1 in Figure 5 shows the adjusted difference in average job tenure duration for each group of fathers relative to white non-immigrant fathers for each year ( ${\hat{β}}_{2 k} + {\hat{β}}_{3 t k}$ ). White, Indian and other racialized immigrant fathers had no significant adjusted difference in job tenure with white non-immigrant fathers throughout the whole period, whereas average tenure was approximately one year lower for Black and Pakistani/Bangladeshi immigrant fathers in the 1990s. This adjusted difference persisted over time, with some fluctuation. In the case of Black immigrant fathers, the gap seems to be driven by those of African and other non-Caribbean ethnicities, with strong fluctuations over time but mostly negative adjusted values for Caribbean immigrant fathers (see Online Appendix Figure B2).

In addition, racialized non-immigrant fathers have large negative adjusted differences with white non-immigrant fathers in the reference period.¹⁷ This gap narrowed or disappeared over time for Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and other non-immigrant groups due to the decrease in average job tenure in the reference category and the lack of change or increase in these non-immigrant groups. Black non-immigrant fathers are the only group of non-immigrant racialized workers for whom this gap persisted or increased (Caribbean and African/other ethnicities alike).

We now turn to a comparison between models 1 and 2 to test whether the trends were driven by the rise in temporary employment contracts, part-time work, and employment in small firms. In Figure 4, we only find small differences between model 1 and 2 estimates. Therefore, these controls play a limited role in accounting for our observed trends for most groups. Only for Pakistani/Bangladeshi immigrant fathers do these variables seem to account for a substantial portion of the negative adjusted trend. In other words, the rise of precarious forms of employment is not the main driver of the declining job stability of fathers in the UK, nor is it driving the trend for immigrant and racialized non-immigrant fathers. This is consistent with previous findings by St-Denis and Hollister (2023).

Next, Figure 5 provides evidence on whether these controls can account for the adjusted difference in average job tenure gap between white non-immigrant fathers and other groups. We find that they account for a substantial portion of the gap with Black and Pakistani/Bangladeshi immigrant fathers,¹⁸ but little to none of the gap with any of the racialized non-immigrant groups. In addition, the role of these controls changed little over time.

Mothers

Turning to mothers in Figure 6 (model 1), we find an increase in the job tenure duration of white non-immigrant mothers¹⁹ (adjusted for changes in sociodemographic characteristics), consistent with a masked instability pattern. Estimates show a similar trend for white immigrant mothers, although it is significantly less pronounced and most of the change is concentrated before 2010–11, after which the trend reverses.

In contrast, we find no significant increase for racialized immigrant and non-immigrant mothers. In the case of Black immigrant mothers, and to a smaller extent Black non-immigrant mothers in recent years, we find a statistically significant decrease in job tenure duration over time, concentrated among Caribbean mothers (see Online Appendix Figure B3). We find little to no statistically significant change for Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi mothers as well as those from other ethnicities. In sum, the masked instability explanation appears to be specific to white mothers while racialized mothers did not benefit from an increase in job stability concomitant with their increased employment rates shown in Figure 3.

Again, estimates from model 2 allow us to further unpack the model 1 results. Here, we find that the decrease in job tenure duration for Black immigrant and non-immigrant mothers observed in 2022–2023 relative to 1992–1993 is largely accounted for by a shift towards jobs with characteristics associated with lower tenure (part-time work, temporary employment contracts, and small firm size). This finding is partly consistent with our hypothesis that racialized and immigrant women will be disproportionately represented among the growing share of workers in precarious jobs. Our estimates show that it appears to only apply to Black mothers.

Finally, model 2 results also show that net of controls for job characteristics, the increase in job tenure over time would have been weaker for white immigrant and non-immigrant mothers, meaning that the decreasing rate of part-time employment (shown in Online Appendix table B8) concentrated among white mothers has been driving their increased job stability. In contrast, the lack of difference between model 1 and 2 estimates for immigrant mothers suggest that this trend has not been experienced by this group.

Next, we ask whether differences in trends across groups of mothers may be due to different starting points in the 1992–1993 job tenure distribution. For that purpose, Figure 7 plots adjusted predictions of difference in average job tenure duration relative to white non-immigrant fathers from 1992 to 2023 (Figure 8 reports the same information, but using non-immigrant white mothers as the reference category). We find that white non-immigrant mothers had the largest negative difference in the reference period, with a predicted gap of five years in 1992–1993. We also find a negative difference of more than four years for white immigrant mothers. In both cases, the gaps substantially narrowed over time, reaching less than one year for white non-immigrant mothers.

Figure 8.

Difference in average job tenure of mothers relative to white non-immigrant mothers.

In contrast, we found smaller but statistically significant negative differences of two to four job tenure years for all groups of racialized mothers regardless of immigration status in the reference period, relative to white non-immigrant fathers. In most cases, the gaps did not differ significantly across ethnicities in the reference period. This is not completely consistent with our hypotheses: we instead expected to find a larger negative gap for Pakistani and Bangladeshi mothers, and smaller gaps for Black and Indian mothers in the 1990s. However, Black immigrant and non-immigrant mothers did have significantly longer job tenure durations than white mothers at baseline, as expected.²⁰

Turning to change over time in Figure 7, trends are consistent with Figure 6 in showing a pronounced and persistent disadvantage for Black immigrant and non-immigrant mothers: the job tenure gap between Black mothers and white non-immigrant fathers is of around two years and does not narrow over time, except for short-term fluctuations. Meanwhile, the negative difference with white non-immigrant fathers narrows slightly over time to around one year for white, Indian and the “all others” residual ethnicity category of immigrant mothers, as well as for Indian non-immigrant mothers. The gap between other groups of racialized mothers and white non-immigrant fathers narrows by a smaller magnitude.

Importantly, Figure 7 shows that by the end of our period of study, white non-immigrant mothers experienced a penalty of approximately half a year of job tenure duration relative to white non-immigrant fathers (stabilizing from 2018–2019 onwards). Interestingly, results from model 2 show that job characteristics play a similar role among all groups of mothers in accounting for the gap with white non-immigrant fathers. That is, precarious work does not seem to drive the gap for one group more than another.

Finally, Figure 8 shows a higher and statistically significant average job tenure for white non-immigrant mothers relative to almost all other groups of mothers at the end of the period (one exception is Pakistani and Bangladeshi non-immigrant mothers, a small group with large fluctuation in estimates). Meanwhile, most groups end the period with higher job tenure duration than Black immigrant and non-immigrant mothers.

While our study focuses on mothers in order to engage more directly with the masked instability literature, we report trends for non-mothers in Figures A5 and A6 (regression output table in Online Appendix D). The patterns are substantially different. First, we find only a limited increase in adjusted job tenure duration for white non-immigrant mothers, consistent with the masked instability hypothesis. Second, the initial gap with white non-immigrant fathers in 1992–1993 is similar for all groups of women, at around two years. Finally, we find no meaningful difference when we similarly compare the results for father presented above to those for non-fathers in Online Appendix figures B5 and B6, suggesting that the parenthood effect is specific to women. These findings are consistent with the idea that the job stability patterns and gaps we observe in this study are driven in part by dynamics related to the attachment of mothers to employment, and by differences in that regard by immigration status and ethnicity.

Wage Premium for Job Stability Across Groups

In this study, our interest in job stability trends is premised on the idea that there can be significant labor market advantages associated with accumulating job tenure, one of them being wage growth. To provide evidence of this, we estimate the association between job tenure and hourly wages in our sample. We do so by regressing the log of hourly wage on job tenure duration (including a quadratic term), controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. We include interaction terms to let the association vary by immigration status and ethnicity, and report results by gender and for separate periods of approximately 10 years.

In Table 2, we show that longer job tenure duration is associated with higher hourly wages for both mothers and fathers over all periods, with smaller estimates in 2010–2019.²¹ Estimates are larger for mothers. This may be due to their over-representation in the public sector, education, and health given that these sectors tend to be more unionized and have job ladders that reward seniority.

Table 2.

OLS Regression of Log Hourly Wage on Job Tenure, by Gender, Immigration Status, and Ethnicity.

	Fathers			Mothers
	1994 to 1999	2000 to 2009	2010 to 2019	1994 to 1999	2000 to 2009	2010 to 2019
Job tenure	0.018***	0.018***	0.011***	0.032***	0.029***	0.024***
Job tenure, squared	0.000***	0.000***	0.000	−0.000***	−0.000***	−0.000***
White Non-Immigrant (ref.)
White Immigrant	0.072	0.152***	−0.006	0.052	0.084**	−0.032
Black Non-Immigrant	−0.030	−0.077	−0.146*	−0.016	0.054	−0.105
Black Immigrant	−0.308***	−0.106	−0.337***	−0.023	0.105*	−0.048
Indian Non-Immigrant	−0.253*	−0.113	0.047	0.475*	0.142	0.049
Indian Immigrant	−0.153*	−0.010	−0.083	0.035	0.163***	−0.098
Pakistani & Bangladeshi Non-Immigrant	−0.453***	−0.121*	−0.106	0.149	0.022	−0.208**
Pakistani & Bangladeshi Immigrant	−0.562***	−0.282***	−0.432***	0.031	−0.164	−0.114
Other Non-Immigrant	−0.146	−0.019	−0.245*	0.091	−0.003	0.060
Other Immigrant	−0.302**	−0.202***	−0.149**	−0.063	0.103**	−0.079*
Job tenure × White Immigrant	0.015	0.014	0.008	0.008	0.010	0.001
Job tenure × Black Non-Immigrant	−0.031	−0.006	−0.031	0.012	−0.002	0.024
Job tenure × Black Immigrant	0.009	−0.024	0.011	0.006	−0.022*	−0.010
Job tenure × Indian Non-Immigrant	0.012	0.004	−0.020	−0.145	−0.019	−0.015
Job tenure × Indian Immigrant	0.007	−0.018	−0.004	−0.018	−0.036***	−0.006
Job tenure × Pakistani & Bangladeshi Non-Immigrant	−0.025	−0.041**	−0.023	0.092	−0.003	0.029
Job tenure × Pakistani & Bangladeshi Immigrant	0.028	−0.014	0.002	−0.093	0.036	−0.028
Job tenure × Other Non-Immigrant	−0.015	0.019	0.044*	−0.023	0.022	−0.014
Job tenure × Other Immigrant	0.048	0.013	−0.013	−0.009	−0.010	−0.013
White Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	−0.001	−0.001*	0.000	−0.000	−0.000	0.000
Black Non-Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	0.002*	0.000	0.001	−0.000	−0.000	−0.001
Black Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	0.000	0.001	0.000	−0.001	0.001	0.000
Indian Non-Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	0.000	0.000	0.001	0.010	0.000	0.001
Indian Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	0.000	0.001	0.000	0.000	0.001***	0.000
Pakistani & Bangladeshi Non-Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	0.011	0.002***	0.001	−0.014	0.001	−0.001
Pakistani & Bangladeshi Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	−0.001	0.001	0.000	0.011***	−0.002	0.001
Other Non-Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	0.000	0.000	−0.001	0.000	−0.001	0.000
Other Immigrant × Job tenure, sq.	−0.001	0.000	0.000	−0.000	−0.000	0.001
Potential labor force experience	0.016***	0.016***	0.024***	0.010**	0.010***	0.029***
Potential labor force experience, squared	0.000***	0.000***	0.000***	−0.000**	−0.000***	−0.001***
Highest qualification below secondary (ref.)
Secondary	0.232***	0.207***	0.172***	0.182***	0.143***	0.020
Post-secondary, below bachelor's degree	0.562***	0.514***	0.418***	0.602***	0.459***	0.245***
Bachelor's degree	0.776***	0.747***	0.660***	0.814***	0.725***	0.460***
Post-graduate degree	0.820***	0.817***	0.777***	0.933***	0.865***	0.652***
Married or cohabiting (ref.)
Separated, divorced or widowed	−0.113***	−0.119***	−0.118***	−0.023*	−0.027***	−0.093***
Number of children under the age of 18	0.009	−0.002	−0.007	−0.029***	−0.029***	−0.031***
Region of residence: London (ref.)
Region of residence: Rest of UK	−0.207***	−0.194***	−0.184***	−0.244***	−0.223***	−0.206***
Intercept	1.671***	1.997***	2.165***	1.473***	1.825***	2.041***
Observations	14397	23935	16925	15173	28380	20956
R-squared	0.294	0.287	0.306	0.349	0.339	0.319

Note: Observations come from a subsample of LFS respondents in their last rotation, who are asked questions on their wages.

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 (p-values are based on heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors).

The interaction terms show that there is no statistically significant difference in the wage premium associated with job tenure by immigration status and ethnicity in most cases and across all periods. In other words, the persistently lower job tenure duration of certain groups of racialized immigrant and non-immigrant mothers and fathers will translate into a significant wage disadvantage.²² In more recent years, this disadvantage is likely to be less pronounced given the weaker association between wages and tenure, consistent with the argument that job mobility is becoming an increasingly accepted career progression strategy (Cappelli 1999; Stone 2006). This appears to apply to both immigrants and non-immigrants.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this paper, we set out to explore how trends in job stability, as measured by average job tenure duration, varied from 1992 to 2023 by gender, immigration status, and ethnicity in a sample of UK mothers and fathers. In doing so, we shed light on a dimension of immigrant employment that has received less attention than others such as employment participation, wages, skills, and work arrangements: job stability. We also aimed to contribute to the literature on trends in job instability by asking whether masked instability patterns were primarily driven by non-immigrant and non-racialized men and women, and whether we would find greater job instability for racialized immigrant men.

One of our key findings is that racialized immigrant and non-immigrant mothers did not experience the same growth in job stability as white mothers (especially non-immigrants). While white non-immigrant and immigrant mothers had lower average job tenure duration in the early 1990s, adjusting for differences in time potentially spent in the UK labor market and in other sociodemographic characteristics, they converged with that of white non-immigrant fathers and surpassed that of racialized immigrant and non-immigrant mothers by 2022–2023. In our findings, the experience of Black mothers also stands out. By the end of the period, Black mothers had experienced a significant decrease in job stability, a persistent gap of around two years in job tenure relative to white non-immigrant fathers, and a smaller but significant gap with white non-immigrant mothers. Our results suggest that this is driven by a growth in precarious employment among this group.

While the results for Black mothers are relatively consistent with our stated hypotheses, we also expected to find persistently low levels of job stability for Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrant mothers. Instead, we found relatively high job tenure duration levels in the early 1990s and no evidence of change over time. The higher-than-expected job stability of Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrant mothers in the 1990s may be a result of substantial selectivity in employment in that period: with very few of those mothers being employed (see Figure 3), those who may have had particularly strong work orientation. This would be partially consistent with recent arguments critical of the “tied movers” perspective (Adserà and Ferrer 2016).

This mismatch between our hypotheses and our results also highlights some of the limitations of our indicator of job stability. It is possible that employed Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrant mothers experience strong attachment to employment, whereas those who are not employed are more likely to be long-term inactive and therefore may not even appear as employees in the LFS cross-sectional data. In contrast, groups of mothers with frequent flows in and out of employment would have lower job tenure while simultaneously having higher participation rates and higher employment rates than groups with a high proportion of long-term inactive mothers. Cross-sectional job tenure data alone does not allow us to distinguish between these two situations. Here, further analyses with longitudinal job transitions data would be useful, including data going beyond short-term job transitions to document longer-term job mobility pathways across groups.

Our second key finding is that all immigrant fathers experienced a decrease in job tenure duration similar to white non-immigrant fathers. In addition, among racialized non-immigrant workers, Black fathers were the only ones experiencing a decrease in job tenure duration and a widening of their gap with white non-immigrant fathers between 1992 and 2023. Together with the findings for mothers, these results highlight the difficult position of Black workers on the UK labor market in terms of job instability. At the same time, the lack of a major difference in trends between immigrant fathers and white non-immigrant fathers is more surprising. Here again, understanding the job and career instability of immigrant workers would require data on the underlying job transition patterns (layoffs, employer changes, etc.).

In the theory section of the paper, a few competing explanations were offered regarding the drivers of job stability dynamics among immigrant workers. However, the job tenure variable we used did not allow us to document their respective importance, which could vary across ethnic groups. For example, similar decreases in job tenure duration over time may mask an increase in voluntary inter-firm mobility for one group and an increase in involuntary job losses for another.

In particular, documenting differences in rates of inter-firm mobility between immigrants and non-immigrants in future research would help make sense of groups-specific trends in job stability. While inter-firm mobility is an increasingly crucial career progression and occupational mobility strategy for all workers in a labor market structured around flexible employment (Cappelli 1999; Stone 2006), changing employers is likely to be one of the primary ways for immigrants to leave the low-wage and overqualified jobs they often hold in the first years following arrival in the UK. This is not a new feature of immigrant integration pathways, and we would gain from understanding specifically how this long-existing pattern interacts with the more fluid structure of the labor market that emerged since the 2000s.

In that regard, existing research comparing the job flows of immigrants and non-immigrants in the UK is lacking. In fact, it instead attempts to unpack the dynamic dimension of group differences in unemployment rates (Demireva and Kesler 2011; Longhi 2020; Reyneri and Fullin 2011). These flows into unemployment are more closely associated with involuntary job losses, a trend that does require further research. In contrast, however, we suggest focusing on all job separations, including those that involve a change in employer without an unemployment spell. Such moves have received some attention in the recent US literature (Fujita, Moscarini and Postel-Vinay 2020), but without disaggregation by immigration status and without a focus on documenting trends in job or career instability more generally (the interest is often more narrowly on business cycles). Detailed analyses of differences in job mobility trajectories across groups of immigrant and non-immigrant men and women from recent cohorts would represent a useful complement to the data presented in this paper.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-mrx-10.1177_01979183261427375 - Supplemental material for The Changing Job Instability of UK Immigrants at the Intersection of Gender and Ethnicity, 1992–2023

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-mrx-10.1177_01979183261427375 for The Changing Job Instability of UK Immigrants at the Intersection of Gender and Ethnicity, 1992–2023 by Xavier St-Denis and Diana Popescu in International Migration Review

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous peer reviewers and the editor for their constructive feedback. They also thank Benoit Dostie and the participants of seminars at HEC Montréal and Western University for helpful comments during the development of this article.

ORCID iD

Xavier St-Denis

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Institut national de la recherche scientifique.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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Supplementary Material

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The Changing Job Instability of UK Immigrants at the Intersection of Gender and Ethnicity,1992–2023

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Job Instability Trends in LMEs

Differences in Job Stability by Immigration Status and Ethnicity

Do Immigrants Experience Greater Job Instability?

Change Over Time in the Job Stability of UK Immigrants and Non-Immigrants

Job Stability Trends at the Intersection of Gender, Immigration Status, and Ethnicity

Societal Trends and Expected Change in Job Stability for Immigrant Women

Non-Standard Work Arrangements

Tied-Mover Dynamics

Cultural Norms, Historical Context, and Employment Participation

A Disaggregated Approach to the Study of Trends in Job Instability

Data and Methods

Evolution of the Ethnic and Gender Composition of the UK Workforce

Estimates of Trends in Job Stability by Gender, Immigration Status, and Ethnicity

Fathers

Mothers

Wage Premium for Job Stability Across Groups

Discussion and Conclusion

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-mrx-10.1177_01979183261427375 - Supplemental material for The Changing Job Instability of UK Immigrants at the Intersection of Gender and Ethnicity, 1992–2023

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

ORCID iD

Funding

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Supplemental Material

Notes

References

Supplementary Material