Ethnicity disparities in job control in the United Kingdom

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• Author: Mark Williams,Senhu Wang,Maria Koumenta
• Date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12414

DOI: 10.1111/irj.12414

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Ethnicity disparities in job control in the

United Kingdom

Mark Williams

1

|Senhu Wang

2

|Maria Koumenta

1

1

School of Business and Managment,

Queen Mary University of London,

London, UK

2

Department of Sociology, National

University of Singapore, Singapore,

Singapore

Correspondence

Mark Williams, Queen Mary University

of London, Mile End Rd, London E1 4NS,

UK.

Email: mark.williams@qmul.ac.uk

Funding information

Economic and Social Research Council;

UK Research and Innovation

Abstract

Despite widely‐reported ethnicity disparities in pay and

occupational attainment, little is known about how

different ethnic groups fare in job control—a crucial

component of job quality with significant implications

for well‐being and health. Drawing on two large‐scale

representative datasets in the United Kingdom

(1992–2022), we find that workers from all Black,

Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups condition-

ally report significantly lower job control than their

White British counterparts, although heterogeneity

exists depending on the BAME group in question.

Ethnicity penalties are also most pronounced for

foreign‐born workers. Despite a slow trend towards

convergence, ethnicity disparities have remained sig-

nificant over the last three decades. We further show

that disparities are largely unexplained by composi-

tional factors such as pay and occupation, demonstrat-

ing ethnicity penalties in job control. By linking

ethnicity to job control, this study contributes to the

growing research on BAME workers in the labour

market, as well as the literatures on job quality and

multisegmented labour markets.

Ind. Relat. 2024;55:33–53. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/irj

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

1|INTRODUCTION

The poorer average labour market prospects of certain Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic

(BAME) groups compared with their White or White British counterparts in the United

Kingdom (UK) is well‐documented. These poorer prospects commonly take the form of lower

pay and higher chances of nonpermanent employment (Brynin & Güveli, 2012; Brynin

et al., 2019; Evans, 2019), and seemingly stem from a constellation of structural barriers faced

by certain ethnic groups, ranging from the shadow of poorer early life conditions and

educational experiences (Sewell, 2021) to hiring discrimination (Heath & DiStasio, 2019a;

2019b), as well as sociocultural issues related to assimilation and marginalisation (McGregor‐

Smith, 2017). In recent years, these inequalities have garnered increasing attention by

policymakers, with the UK government conducting several reviews (e.g., Sewell, 2021), and in

relation to specifically work, encouraging (though not mandating) ethnicity pay gap reporting

by organisations (Race Disparity Unit, Equality Hub, Department for Business and Trade,

and The Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch MP, 2023).

Alongside wider recognition of ethnicity‐based disparities in the labour market, there has

been a trend towards greater acceptance that job quality in the UK and in other nations

involves more than pay, security and fair treatment, but also the nature of job tasks and work

organisation. This is encapsulated in various national and regional job quality frameworks such

as ‘Good Work’and ‘Fair Work’in the UK and supra‐national frameworks (Williams

et al., 2020). These frameworks agree that more intrinsic features of work related to job design

are core aspects of job quality—including job control—defined in this study as the extent to

which workers can decide what tasks they do and how they do them (Karasek, 1979: 238). Job

control is central to models of direct participation and related literatures. For instance, within

the employment relations and HRM literature, job control is seen as a component of high‐

involvement management (Wood & de Menezes, 2011). In seminal industrial sociology

contributions, it is seen as a critical antecedent to alienation (Blauner, 1964; Kohn, 1976);

within the organisation psychology literature as central to models of job stress (Karasek &

Theorell, 1990), positive job attitudes, and behaviours (Hackman & Oldham, 1980). Within the

public health literature, job control has been shown to be a predictor of morbidity and mortality

(Marmot et al., 1991).

In this paper, we connect ethnicity inequalities and (intrinsic) job quality, two lines of

investigation that have largely been separate. On the one hand, to our knowledge, scarce

evidence exists on the extent of ethnicity disparities in the underlying intrinsic conditions of

jobs that strongly predict well‐being, such as job control, which as mentioned, is now routinely

included in job quality policy definitions both in the UK and internationally. On the other

hand, job quality research has primarily focused on disparities on other protected

characteristics such as sex (e.g., Stier & Yaish, 2014; Warren & Lyonette, 2018) and important

nonprotected characteristics such as region of residence (e.g., IFOW, 2021) and occupational

characteristics (e.g., Koumenta & Williams, 2019). However, it has ignored the increasing

population diversity and implicitly assumes that job quality patterns found in the ethnic

majority population group can be applied to ethnic minority groups (c.f. Zwysen &

Demireva, 2018). The failure to integrate both streams of research not only precludes a

comprehensive understanding of contemporary labour market inequalities, but also may lead

to misleading conclusions or policy suggestions.

To begin to fill this gap, this article aims to provide first large‐scale empirical analysis of

how ethnicity relates to the degree of job control in the UK. Drawing on the Understanding

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