Anti-discrimination enforcement faces deep vulnerabilities across the United States and Europe, where historical protections struggle against structural hurdles. Federal agencies face funding constraints that threaten equal employment enforcement, while European regional labor markets expose stark trade-offs between immigrant employment rates and job quality.
Almost six decades ago, the U.S. government established foundational civil rights protections to combat workplace segregation and guarantee fair access to jobs. Landmark regulations made it illegal for employers to discriminate based on sex, race, color, national origin, or religion. In addition, it created what continue to be the two main agencies responsible for the enforcement of federal anti-discrimination efforts—the independent U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the U.S. Department of Labor. These two agencies are charged with removing barriers to employment opportunities, promoting the creation of fair and equitable jobs ladders, and pushing against workplace segregation—primarily through the enforcement of anti-discrimination protections.
These agencies historically drove major progress in opening well-paying occupations to women and workers of color, particularly between the late 1960s and early 1980s, when affirmative action and federal anti-discrimination laws led to the better representation of women workers and workers of color in both the overall U.S. workforce and in well-paying occupations. Yet employment discrimination remains a pervasive feature of the modern economy. Low-income workers, women, and workers of color remain especially vulnerable to unlawful practices. Especially at risk are mostly low-income U.S. workers who must deal with employers who flout U.S. labor market laws and regulations, and engage in harassment, taking advantage of structural racism and sexism that limit outside options and economic security for workers of color, women workers, and, in particular, women workers of color such as Black women and Native American women.
Federal Enforcement Gaps and Structural Barriers in the U.S.
Systemic hurdles consistently undermine civil rights enforcement across the American economy. Insufficient funding and vulnerability to political whims often keep these two federal agencies from protecting workers against unfair treatment at work, and structural power imbalances in the country’s employment relations severely inhibit the effective enforcement of civil rights.
Workplace discrimination harms the workers who experience it, exacerbates structural and longstanding inequities in the U.S. labor market, and holds back economic growth and dynamism. As a result of these continuing practices by employers, millions of workers continue to face discrimination and remain vulnerable to unfair, inequitable, and often illegal workplace practices. This is due to racial and ethnic and gender economic stratification stretching back centuries. Until this “double gap” is closed, the U.S. economy will remain inequitable, and equitable economic growth that is sustainable will remain out of reach.
Briefly, those policy solutions are to: Increase compliance with anti-discrimination laws and regulations by substantially increasing funding for the federal enforcement agencies so they can do their jobs; Address gaps in anti-discrimination laws that exclude some of the most vulnerable workers and undermine their effectiveness, particularly for those who work for employers with fewer than 15 employees and are excluded from anti-discrimination enforcement; Expand protected traits under anti-discrimination protections to include more characteristics associated with protected racial and religious groups; Deploy and strengthen anti-discrimination enforcement strategies to monitor.
Regional Labor Markets and the European Migrant Penalty
Across the Atlantic, researchers examining European labor dynamics track how geographical origin shapes socioeconomic integration. Immigration is arguably the socio-economic phenomenon that more than any other is changing European societies in recent years, making them more and more multi-ethnic. Geographical origin has become an increasingly relevant factor of stratification like gender, social origin and education, as migrants represent nowadays a structural component of the demand and supply in European labor markets. In this context, many scholars have compared the labor market performance of immigrants and natives to shed light on possible different mechanisms of socio-economic integration, finding a so-called migrant (or ethnic) penalty, defined from a micro-level perspective as the remaining difference in immigrants’ and natives’ labor market achievement when socio-demographic characteristics are controlled for.
Data covering 189 regions across 19 countries analyzed through a set of hierarchical models on EU-LFS data between 2009 and 2015 reveals that local occupational structures heavily moderate this penalty. Several studies on Europe highlighted the existence of a migrant penalty in terms of both probability of being employed (or avoiding the risk of unemployment) and of having a high-skilled job. These studies have emphasized how the migrant penalty is moderated by the macro-institutional context, considering the role of some key features at the national or supra-national level, highlighting a distinction between the double penalty model and the trade-off model of migrants’ labor market integration: in Central-Northern Europe, migrants face a double penalty with respect to natives in terms of employment and job quality.
By contrast, Southern European nations present a distinct trade-off, where natives and immigrants have similar chances to be employed, but the latter are strongly penalized in terms of getting a high-skilled job. This macro-level perspective overlooks the fact that, within the same country, different patterns of immigrants’ labor market insertion and penalty at the local or meso-level may coexist.
The Trade-Off Between Employment and Job Quality
Sub-national characteristics create complex outcomes for migrant workers depending on regional labor demands. Since different contexts within the same country share the same formal institutional setting, the within-country heterogeneity in patterns of immigrants’ occupational integration should be related to the structure and the informal regulation of the labor markets, in particular referring to the relevance of the secondary labor market and the role of informal and inherently locally-rooted institutions, like social norms and practices, collective beliefs and conventions.
In areas where the share of low-status jobs is higher, mid-high educated immigrants from less developed countries are less (or not) penalized compared to natives in terms of employment, while they face a stronger penalty in terms of job quality. However, the trade-off is not observed when considering low-educated migrants or those from high-income countries.
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