Ethnic workers 'earn more in public sector'

Ethnic workers 'earn more in public sector'

Ambitious ethnic minority workers should sign up for a career in the public sector - where they can expect to earn almost 10 per cent more than their white colleagues - instead of suffering pay discrimination in the business world, economists have found.

After several years of government spending growth, as Labour pours cash into schools and hospitals, working in the public sector has become, on average, more rewarding than a job in business, and ethnic minority workers have done particularly well.

In a paper to be presented to the Royal Economic Society's annual conference in Warwick this week, Monojit Chatterji and Karen Mumford find that by choosing the civil service, ethnic minorities win because they not only avoid the 7.5 per cent pay gap in the private sector but also pocket a 9.3 per cent premium over white public sector staff. 'Ethnic minorities earn more than others in the public sector and substantially less than others in the private sector,' the authors say.

Advertisement starts

---

---

Advertisement ends

A spokesperson for the Commission for Racial Equality welcomed the finding that ethnic minority workers are well rewarded in the public sector, but warned that many non-white workers are still stuck at the bottom of the pile.

'There's some good news in the report that shows that the public sector has become slightly more representative of the population, but unfortunately there are still vast inequalities. In the junior roles you still find large numbers of women and ethnic minority workers and at the top you find a small amount of white, middle-class men.'

Despite a few high-profile trailblazers, such as Sir Suma Chakrabarti, permanent secretary at the Department for International Development, government figures show that just 3.2 per cent of senior management posts in Whitehall are filled by ethnic minority staff.

'These problems won't be solved overnight and it's worrying to see how far we need to go,' the CRE spokesperson said.

As well as highlighting the benefits to non-white workers of a public sector job, the study shows there is a wider variation in pay rates in the public sector. On average, public sector workers earn more - partly, the authors say, because more are in high-skilled, white-collar jobs.

'Relative employment conditions have changed across the public and private sectors over the last decade with the former becoming a more attractive earnings option,' the researchers say. However, with Gordon Brown insisting public sector pay deals must conform to a 2 per cent ceiling, earnings growth has probably hit a high-water mark.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006