Soziologie

As part of the Lecture Series of the DFG Research Training Group “Cross-Border Labor Markets: Transnational market makers, infrastructures, institutions” (RTG2951), Prof. Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University, Detroit) gives a lecture based on her recent publication on “Global Labor Migration. New Directions” (2022, University of Illinois Press)

This lecture examines the differential impact of job displacement on migrants and natives. Using administrative data for Germany from 1997-2016, we identify mass layoffs and estimate the trajectory of earnings and employment of observationally similar migrants and natives displaced from the same establishment. Despite similar pre-layoff careers, migrants lose an additional 9% of their earnings in the first 5 years after displacement. This gap arises from both lower re-employment probabilities and post-layoff wages and is not driven by selective return migration. Key mechanisms include sorting into lower-quality firms and depending on lower-quality coworker networks during job search.

The lecture will take place on July 15, 2024, 14:00 in the Horst-Schimanski-Saal, Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Schifferstraße 44, University Duisburg-Essen. All interested parties are warmly invited.

Prof. Heidi Gottfried is a professor of sociology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, with a research focus on labour movements, gender and migration studies. As the author and editor of six books and special issues with a recent focus on the political economy of care migration and theorizing scales in transnational research, her work brings important theoretical, methodological and empirical expertise to the research programme. She is a founding member of the Global Labor Migration Network based at the University of Maryland and co-editor with Eileen Boris, Julie Greene and Joo-Cheong Tham of the research volume Global Labor Migration (2022, University of Illinois Press).