Fuelling displacement and labour market segmentation in low-skilled jobs? Insights from a local study of migrant and student employment

Abstract

Medium-term employment trends highlight increasing labour market disadvantage for people with no/low qualifications. Consequently, established local populations with no/low qualifications have been reported as being hostile to ‘new arrivals’ filling local jobs, on the basis that they are perceived as taking employment opportunities away from them. Drawing on a local study of migrant and student employment on opportunities for people with no/low formal qualifications in the UK city of Coventry, this paper shows how labour market restructuring in the context of neoliberalism has resulted in an increasingly compartmentalised labour market, in which some types of employment have become undesirable and often not feasible for some local workers, but attractive (or at least acceptable) for other groups, including migrant workers and students. The outcome is reduced labour market opportunities for local people with no/low qualifications, because the more flexible migrant workers and students allow employers to restructure their workforces and develop jobs that fit with the ‘frames of reference’ of these groups but match the requirements of some established local people less well.