Undercover job seekers expose huge race bias

A secret Government sting operation targeting hundreds of employers across Britain has uncovered widespread racial discrimination against workers with African and Asian names.

Civil servants sent nearly 3000 job applications for real jobs under false identities in an attempt to discover if employers were discriminating against jobseekers with foreign names.

Using names recognisably from three different communities - Nazia Mahmood, Mariam Namagembe and Alison Taylor - false identities were created with similar experience and qualifications. Every false applicant was given a British education and work histories.

They found that a white applicant would send nine applications before receiving either an invitation to an interview or an encouraging telephone call.

Minority candidates with the same British qualifications and experience had to send 16 applications before receiving a similar response.

The results have prompted Employment Minister Jim Knight to consider barring companies found to have discriminated against employees from applying for Government contracts.

"We suspected there was a problem. This uncovers the shocking scale of the problem," he said. "Candidates with an Asian or African name are facing real discrimination and this has exposed the fact that companies are missing out on real talent."

Researchers from the National Centre for Social Research sent three different applications to 987 actual vacancies between November 2008 and May 2009. Nine different occupations were chosen, ranging from well-qualified positions such as accountants and IT technicians to less well-paid positions such as care workers and sales assistants.

All the job vacancies were in the private, public and voluntary sectors and were based in the cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, London and Manchester.

The report, to be released today, concludes that there was no plausible explanation for the difference in treatment other than racial discrimination.

It also finds that public sector employers were less likely to have discriminated on the grounds of race than those in the private sector. One of the reasons for this discrepancy, according to the conclusion, is the use of standard application forms in the public sector which hide or disguise the ethnicity of an applicant.

- OBSERVER