University of Mannheim, MZES, Mannheim, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 Jan 31;17(1):e0262337. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262337. eCollection 2022.
The speed of the economic downturn in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has been exceptional, causing mass layoffs-in Germany up to 30% of the workforce in some industries. Economic rationale suggests that the decision on which workers are fired should depend on productivity-related individual factors. However, from hiring situations we know that discrimination-i.e., decisions driven by characteristics unrelated to productivity-is widespread in Western labor markets. Drawing on representative survey data on forced layoffs and short-time work collected in Germany between April and December 2020, this study highlights that discrimination against immigrants is also present in firing situations. The analysis shows that employees with a migration background are significantly more likely to lose their job than native workers when otherwise healthy firms are unexpectedly forced to let go of part of their workforce, while firms make more efforts to substitute firing with short-time working schemes for their native workers. Adjusting for detailed job-related characteristics shows that the findings are unlikely to be driven by systematic differences in productivity between migrants and natives. Moreover, using industry-specific variation in the extent of the economic downturn, I demonstrate that layoff probabilities hardly differ across the less affected industries, but that the gap between migrants and natives increases with the magnitude of the shock. In the hardest-hit industries, job loss probability among migrants is three times higher than among natives. This confirms the hypothesis that firing discrimination puts additional pressure on the immigrant workforce in times of crisis.
在 COVID-19 大流行之后，经济下滑的速度异常之快，导致大量裁员——在德国，一些行业的员工中有多达 30%被解雇。经济理论表明，解雇哪些工人的决定应该取决于与生产力相关的个人因素。然而，从招聘情况我们知道，在西方劳动力市场中，歧视——即由与生产力无关的特征驱动的决策——是普遍存在的。本研究利用 2020 年 4 月至 12 月期间在德国收集的关于强制裁员和缩短工作时间的代表性调查数据，强调了在裁员情况下也存在对移民的歧视。分析表明，在 otherwise healthy 企业突然被迫裁员的情况下，具有移民背景的员工比本地员工更有可能失去工作，而企业更倾向于通过缩短工作时间来替代解雇他们的本地员工。在调整了详细的与工作相关的特征后，研究结果不太可能是由移民和本地人之间生产力的系统性差异所驱动。此外，利用经济下滑程度的行业特定变化，我证明了裁员概率在受影响较小的行业之间几乎没有差异，但在冲击幅度较大的情况下，移民和本地人的差距会扩大。在受影响最严重的行业中，移民的失业概率是本地人的三倍。这证实了这样一种假设，即在危机时期，解雇歧视会给移民劳动力带来额外的压力。
