‘Race’, Employment and Social Change: a critique of current orthodoxies

Introduction In 2003, the British Cabinet Office Strategy Unit published a major report establishing that the employment position of racialized minorities had undergone a dramatic transformation over the past four decades (Strategy Unit 2003). Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, when racialized minority groups had found themselves located overwhelmingly at the bottom of the English occupational structure, encouraging weberian and marxist sociologists to conceive of them as constituting either an underclass or a racialized class fraction (Rex and Tomlinson 1979; Miles 1982), the Cabinet Office report claimed that today: The extent and nature of [racialised] disadvantage differs significantly by ethnic group. While ethnic minorities are disadvantaged on average, the labour market successes of the Indians and Chinese show that the old picture of White success and ethnic minority under-performance is now out of date (Strategy Unit 2003, p. 19). Of course, such a conclusion is not new; evidence confirming this transformation has been available for over a decade (see for example Jones 1993). However, it was the 4 th National Survey of Ethnic Minorities (from now on 4 th NSEM) (Modood et al 1997) carried out in 1994 that first systematically mapped the changing employment profile of different racialized minority groups. 3 Specifically, it showed that by the mid-1990s, similar proportions of 'white' men and men of Indian descent were represented in non-manual work whereas a slightly higher proportion of men of African Asian descent were in such work. Although men of Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent continued to be significantly under-represented in non-manual work compared to 'white' men, this differential had closed over the 1980s and 1990s. Conversely, men of Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin continued to be over-represented in manual jobs compared to 'white' men and those of African Asian and Indian Similar proportions of 'white' and Caribbean women were in non-manual work whereas a slightly higher proportion of women of African Asian descent were in this type of work. Although women of Indian and Pakistani descent continued to be slightly under-represented in non-manual work compared to the above groups, this differential had closed over the past twenty years. Conversely, women of Indian and Pakistani origin were slightly over-represented in manual jobs compared to 'white' women and those of Caribbean and African Asian the conclusions of the Cabinet Office report concluded that 'There is, then, an overall trend of progress in the job levels of ethnic minorities and a …