Monitoring Northern Ireland's Workforce 2019 - High level trends over time
The central purpose of employer monitoring information is to allow employers (through their Article 55 reviews) to determine whether members of each community are afforded fair participation in those individual employments, however, there is also interest in considering monitoring figures at the Northern Ireland level.
The Commission’s annual ‘Fair Employment Monitoring report’ has for more than two decades aggregated monitoring information across all monitored employers in Northern Ireland, to produce composition figures (employees, applicants, appointees, promotees, leavers) at the Northern Ireland level and for key sectors.
By doing so, the Monitoring Report 30: Annual Summary of Monitoring Returns, 2019 (pdf, 788kb) seeks to inform employers and interested parties about aggregate compositional patterns that, alongside other information on local labour availability, might suggest a dynamic or pattern that might better inform their own considerations of fair participation within their own or specific employment(s).
This, the 30th Annual Monitoring Report, presents an aggregated summary of the 3,815 valid monitoring returns received during 2019 from 105 public authorities and 3,710 private sector concerns. These returns were mostly received between 1st January and 31st December 2019, with a period of extension granted to some companies due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This year’s report shows the Protestant community share of the monitored workforce was [50.5%] and the Roman Catholic community share was [49.5%].
Key findings
Employment Stocks:
- While members of the Protestant community continue to comprise the majority of the monitored workforce, the Roman Catholic community share continues to increase (by around [0.4 pp] per annum) to [49.5%] in 2019. A gradual upward trend (averaging around [0.5 pp] per annum) in the Roman Catholic share of the monitored workforce has been observed since 2001.
- In 2016, the Roman Catholic community composition of those in monitored employment ceased to approximate estimates of Roman Catholics available for work. The Roman Catholic composition of the monitored workforce was 4.9 percentage points lower than the broad approximation of Roman Catholics available for work. In 2019, the difference had reduced to 2.6 percentage points.
Employment Flows:
- For the eleventh consecutive year, the Roman Catholic community [53.1%] comprised a greater proportion of applicants than the Protestant community [44.9%].
- In every year since 2006, members of the Roman Catholic community [53.3%] comprised a greater proportion of appointees than did the Protestant community [46.7%]. In 2019, the Roman Catholic community share remained unchanged from the previous year. Overall their share has increased by [8.5 pp] from [44.8%] in 2001.
- In 2019, the Roman Catholic community [52.4%] comprised a greater proportion of leavers than did the Protestant community [47.6%]. Overall, the Protestant community share of leavers has decreased by [8.2 pp] from [55.8%] in 2001.
Technical tables and charts for each of the sections are available upon request by emailing Leanne Brown at lbrown@equalityni.org