Employment Opportunities, Earnings, and the Journey to Work of Minority Workers in Great Britain
The cost to minority workers of employer discrimination is generally measured in a competitive framework which focuses upon differences in on-the-job benefits (usually wage rates) between racial groups after training and experience are allowed for, with other potential costs of employer discrimination given at best more subsidiary attention (Chiswick (i 98 I), Dex (i 984), McNabb and Psacharopoulos (I982), McCormick (i986), and Stewart (I983) have recently provided analyses of Asian and West Indian workers in the United Kingdom). This paper explores the consequences of employer discrimination if firms cannot discriminate by offering different wages for the same job, but may set higher job rejection rates perhaps costlessly because markets do not clear. Our primary focus is upon comparative journey-to-work patterns and expenditures for Asian and West Indian workers in the United Kingdom, and whether these workers accept jobs at locations that would be unacceptable to whites in order to avoid either a longer spell of unemployment or an inferior occupation with commensurate lower earnings. Thus, within a given residential area minority workers may experience greater commuting expenditures, ceteris paribus, which are overlooked when comparing earnings or occupational status. Unlike previous models of search and discrimination in labour markets, the focus is placed upon employee response to discrimination rather than the search behaviour of discriminating employers (see Lippman and McCall, I 976). The possibility that the costs of reaching suitable work-sites should be incorporated into our understanding of the problems faced by minority workers has been investigated in the United States, although in a different context, by Kain (i 964, I 968, I 980) and various other authors, including, recently, Ellwood (i983). Kain considers that the cost of housing-market discrimination is understated by focusing upon the relative price of housing for blacks, because this overlooks how obstacles to black workers obtaining suburban accommodation concentrates the supply of black labour into comparatively declining inner-city areas. Whereas Kain argues that housing-market discrimination reduces, earnings net of travel costs by creating a spatial mismatch of workers and jobs, the concern in this paper is that earnings net of travel costs are reduced because job-market discrimination may increase average journey to work distance.