Migrant and Satisfied? The Ethnic Gap in Job Satisfaction in the Italian Labor Market

Abstract

Job satisfaction is a desirable outcome both at the organizational and at the individual level. Anyway, little is known about the gap between natives’ and migrants’ job satisfaction, which represents a critical issue in the light of the increasing presence of foreigner workers in the Western labor markets. In order to shed light on this issue, we estimate a number of OLS models to quantify sex-specific natives’ and migrants’ job satisfaction, by exploiting a particularly detailed Italian source of data (the Survey of Social Condition and Integration of Foreign Citizens). We find that being a migrant is not associated per se with any premium or penalty in job satisfaction. When we control for the different socio-demographic features and job characteristics of natives and migrants, it turns out that migrants are more satisfied than natives. Hence, it emerges in Italy a job satisfaction paradox based on the worker’s migratory status.