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21st January 2010

NEWS IN BRIEF

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has this week published the first comprehensive report looking at the skills and employment patterns of Britain’s eastern European migrants.

The report - The UK’s New Europeans - found that these migrants were primarily working in low skilled, low paid employment. Despite having higher education attainment levels than local employees, eastern Europeans earned on average 12.5 per cent less than British-born workers.

More than half of the 1.5 million people from “new” European countries have since returned home. Only 700,000 people remain, with in-flows of Eastern European migrants to Britain dropping by more than 60 per cent in the past three years.

The report found that as a group, eastern Europeans enjoyed a significantly lower rate of unemployment compared to British-born workers and their use of the welfare system was less than half that of British-born residents.

But many Eastern Europeans had problems progressing their careers. This was partly because they did not have the language skills that employers needed and, as a result, were more likely than other new migrants to report difficulties in finding a job.

On average, these migrants (and especially Polish people) are young and work for low wages in low-skilled jobs, even if they are highly educated. Unlike other groups they work across the country in diverse locations.

The report looked at the skills and employment patterns of eastern Europeans from countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, since they joined the European Union.

The Migration Policy Institute was commissioned by the EHRC to produce the report which includes analysis of data from the Labour Force Survey, the Worker Registration Scheme and other government data and literature.

For more information, go to: http://www.equalityhumanrights.com

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