Ethnic Discrimination in the Greek Labour Market: Occupational Access, Insurance Coverage, and Wage Offers

The paper investigates whether low skilled male Albanians face unequal treatment in the Greek labour market, two years after the national adoption of the European anti-discrimination employment legislation. By means of a Correspondence Test we have estimated that Albanians face 43.5% net discrimination of access to occupations. Concentrating on the equal chance cases, we subsequently found that Albanians face 36.5% less chance of being registered with insurance coverage, while their potential wage contracts are on the average 8.8% below those of Greeks, and 5.3% below the legal minimum wage. As it comes to the reasons for wage discrimination, using an indirect approach we interestingly found that the employers themselves “put the blame” on profit strategies (84.4%), on statistical discrimination (9.6%), and on taste discrimination (7.8%).