This paper focuses on the labour disparities between Sub-Saharan African immigrants in the Netherlands, a hitherto undescribed ethnic group, and the native Dutch population. Using unique data with nationwide coverage, the analysis reveals that the labour market position of Sub-Saharan Africans displays an exceptionally large disparity with the native Dutch, compared with discrepancies found in previous research on other immigrant groups. The outcomes also show great differences across the Sub-Saharan groups with Cape Verdeans and South Africans deviating the least from the native Dutch, Ghanaians occupying an intermediate position, while people from Somalia, Eritrea, Congo, Sudan and Sierra Leone are in the worst position. Most importantly, we found that the conventional human capital model does not account for much of the disparity between Sub-Saharan Africans and the native Dutch, even when the model is expanded with language proficiency as an additional variable. Considering these findings, we suggest that alternative explanations, such as society of origin, the operation of norm images and ethnic concentration in specific sectors impeding mobilities should be researched further.

Starting from the empirical evidence that minorities are more likely to work on flexible contracts, we investigated the existence of an ethnic gap in flexible contracts between the native Dutch population and sub-Saharan African immigrants between 2006 and 2012. The migrant group is taken as a test case of 'outsiders'. This study found, quite surprisingly and contrary to what several theories predict, that the expected ethnic gap in job status between the two groups disappeared in the 6 years between 2006 and 2012. Many sub-Saharan Africans successfully transformed their flexible contracts into permanent ones, catching up with the native Dutch by 2012. The analysis of the statutory provisions showed that the workforce numerical composition in the cleaning industry was important for the inclusiveness of sub-Saharan immigrants. This numerical compositional effect was facilitated by the collective agreements negotiated by trade unions, agreements that were extended to temp workers. Sub-Saharan Africans, overrepresented in the cleaning industry, have benefitedThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.