Bloomberg BNA: Need Employees for Unusual Hours? Seek Foreign-Born Workers

There are jobs in nearly every industry that require employees to work odd hours, and immigrants are increasingly more likely to fill these openings, research finds.

Documented immigrants are willing to take these shifts and are an untapped pool to recruit for jobs that employers are likely having trouble filling in today’s competitive labor market, Angie Marek, director of research for the Partnership for a New American Economy, told Bloomberg BNA July 13. Specifically, the organization found that foreign-born workers are 25.2 percent more likely to work weekends than U.S.-born workers and 15.6 percent more likely to work unusual hours in general.

This could be good news for a variety of important economic sectors, Marek said. For example, immigrants working in a variety of health-care positions are considerably more likely to work unusual hours than their U.S.-born peers. Immigrant physicians are 20.6 percent more likely to work unusual hours than their peers, while the comparable figure for immigrant health-care support workers, such as nursing assistants, is 16.8 percent, the research found. Immigrants in education, library services, and related fields are 23.4 percent more likely to take on odd-hours work than their peers, and this pattern held true for the education, manufacturing, farming, and technology sectors as well, according to the research.

Read the full story from Bloomberg BNA: Need Employees for Unusual Hours? Seek Foreign-Born Workers

Read the full report from New American Economy: On the Clock: How Immigrants Fill Gaps in the Labor Market by Working Nontraditional Hours