Employment patterns for Polish migrants in south-east England

The research was conducted between 2008 and 2010 and the paper was published in 2011.

The objectives were to:

• improve understanding about the employment patterns for Polish migrants in south-east England
• determine the extent to which occupations in England matched those previously secured in Poland
• examine what impact education, age and gender had on pay
• explore the link between using an employment agency and securing a skilled manual or non-manual occupation.

We examined the situation for migrants who had arrived and accepted their first job and then changed jobs to a new role, comparing the first job with their current employment. We found that the first job that migrants undertook in the UK did not reflect their skill set; graduates and skilled workers accepted work for which they were over-qualified, meaning that returns to human capital were negligible. However, in their current roles, an extra year of education increased the weekly gross wage by 3.2 per cent. There was evidence of a gender differential in pay in both first and current jobs and that older workers were paid more than their younger counterparts initially but this effect became insignificant in the current job. We found that hours worked was a significant factor in wage determination. However, the influence of hours worked on wages declined by approximately 38 per cent between the first and current job.

Results from multinomial logit models suggested that over time there was some ‘match’ between the occupational groupings that these workers were attached to in Poland and the United Kingdom. Initially, when migrants arrived, limited savings and a high cost of living forced people to find work very quickly and led to mismatches where university graduates were taking cleaning and building jobs. As time went on, and language proficiency improved, migrants were able to secure employment that was a better match to their qualifications.

We also found evidence that the use of employment agencies by some of these workers increases the likelihood of employment in skilled manual and non-manual occupations. Workers who have had supervisory responsibility in the United Kingdom were more likely to be in professional or intermediate occupations.