Job market inequality
October 15, 2009
Germany may not be quite the egalitarian meritocracy it might imagine itself. This is the conclusion of a new study published Thursday in Berlin by the OECD, the international organization of 30 free-market-based democratic countries. The study found that children born of German parents have much better chances of finding work, even with the same high school qualifications.
16 OECD member states took part in the survey, which compared the careers of young people in a 20-29-year-old age bracket. Germany came second only to Belgium in the list of most unfair Western democracies.
The number of young people with no high school graduation or equivalent vocational qualification in Germany is twice as high among immigrant families than it is among children with at least one German parent.
Employer prejudices prevail
But even those children of immigrant families with high school graduation have trouble finding work, according to the study. 90 percent of 20-29-year-old male high-school graduates with German parents have a job, compared with only 81 percent in an identical demographic, but with immigrant backgrounds.
OECD expert Thomas Liebig believes that this may show that German employers are still strongly prejudiced. "One explanation could be that the job market is dominated by the expectation that immigrants and their children are less qualified," he said.
Children of immigrant parents have particular difficulty in finding work in public services. Only three percent of 20-29-year-old high school graduates of immigrant families are employed in public services, compared to 10 percent of those with German parents. This is the biggest discrepancy in any of the countries surveyed.
The OECD showed unease at the statistics. Liebig said that the survey's results were surprising, since high-school graduates of immigrant families had generally attained their qualifications in Germany. The OECD's findings on the educational circumstances of immigrants in Germany were similar to those of PISA studies.
bk/AFP/AP/dpa
Editor: Andreas Illmer