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Employment in a “Land of Opportunity?” Immigrants’ Experiences of Racism and Discrimination in the Australian Workplace

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Abstract

Immigrants are an important part of the Australian labor force and constitute a major source of net labor force growth. Immigrants arriving in Australia, however, face a number of barriers finding employment that is commensurate with their training and education (Reid, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 36:120-125, 2012) and can end up in poor-quality jobs. Through a series of interviews and focus groups with newcomers, our study examined immigrants’ experience of finding employment and their working conditions in Australia. In this manuscript, we specifically explore how discrimination shaped workers’ experiences and the strategies workers used to overcome and deal with the barriers they encountered. We end with a discussion of how racism and its consequences can impact quality of work and worker health and safety.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the workers who participated in this study and shared their stories of working in Australia. This project has been funded by an Australian Research Council grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Agnieszka Kosny

  2. Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Agnieszka Kosny

  3. Institute for Work & Health, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Agnieszka Kosny

  4. Oral Health Centre, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

    Iracema Santos

  5. School of Public Health, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia

    Alison Reid

Authors
  1. Agnieszka Kosny
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  2. Iracema Santos
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  3. Alison Reid
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Correspondence to Agnieszka Kosny.

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Kosny, A., Santos, I. & Reid, A. Employment in a “Land of Opportunity?” Immigrants’ Experiences of Racism and Discrimination in the Australian Workplace. Int. Migration & Integration 18, 483–497 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-016-0482-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-016-0482-0

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