THE EQUALITY IMPLICATIONS OF BEING A MIGRANT IN BRITAIN
Table 6.3 Sex Age
Workforce in social care, 2005 (per cent) Male Female <30 30-44 45+
UK-born 12 88 23 36 41
Foreign-born 18 82 30 36 34
Source: Cangiano, 2007, and LFS.
Geographically there were considerable variations, with 68 per cent of care assistants in London in 2006 being foreign-born, but only six per cent in Wales (Experian, 2007). Many migrants had entered recently: 64 per cent of Poles arrived in 2005, since when new registrations on the WRS have declined (UKBA et al, 2008). For the latter group, work in the care sector may be a first step towards higher-paid employment and forms part of the concern over high levels of turnover and ability to provide high quality care (Personnel Today, 8 May 2007). It is likely that employment will need to expand: the Skills for Care Report (2008) forecast that it could increase by 80 per cent by 2025 and require an additional 2.5 million workers to cope with new ways of providing care and a growing older population. Individuals receiving direct care payments have increased rapidly in the past few years, initially among adults with disabilities (16,140 in 2006–7), but older people (13,184 in 2006–7) are set to overtake them as the largest group. In addition to the 47,088 individuals receiving direct care payments, there are an estimated 145,000 older people funding their own care (Eborall and Griffiths, 2008: 23–4). The consumer of care is likely to seek out labour that is cheap yet authentically ‘caring’ (Ungerson, 2003), which may lead to the employment of labour unprotected by social rights and employment regulation. The Act does apply to agency workers, but the increasing encouragement of direct payments and individual personal budgets is turning individuals in need of care (or their carers) into employers. Earlier research on migrant domestic labour, often undocumented, found that many employers in the UK did not believe that normal rights of minimum pay and hours worked should apply to their workers. They also often expressed attitudes and stereotypes that were blatantly racist and would not be tolerated elsewhere (Anderson, 2006). There is thus a need to monitor what is happening via these funding arrangements against the axes of discrimination. Hospitality The UK’s hospitality sector currently employs over 250,000 migrants (2006 data), which is equivalent to about 22 per cent of total employment and double the contribution migrants make to overall employment in the UK economy (11 per cent) 78