 Discrimination and favouritism among South African workers: Ethnic identity and union membershipChiara Ravetti, Mare Sarr, Daniel Munene and Timothy Swanson World Development, 2019, vol. 123, issue C, - Abstract: This paper analyses the ways in which ethnic identity and labour institutions shape favouritism and discrimination among workers. We conduct a lab experiment in the field with South African coal miners from various ethnic groups and with different trade union membership status. Our analysis suggests that union identity and ethnic identity are two social constructs that operate in a distinct and opposite fashion. Unionization acts as a factor of workers solidarity beyond the confine of union membership. Conversely, ethnicity operates as the linchpin through which discrimination among workers is infused not only between ethnic majority and minorities, but also within the majority group itself. We find that the widespread practice of subcontracting in the mining sector exacerbates ethnic discrimination among workers both between and within ethnic groupings. Keywords: Discrimination; Ethnicity; Labour market segmentation; Trade union; Dictator game (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:123:y:2019:i:c:18 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.027 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
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