General introduction

In the 1950s and 1960s, many major urban areas of Britain which had been relatively monolingual and monocultural became multiethnic for the first time. A similar process of transformation occurred in many large industrialized cities of the world and for a similar reason: the need to fill unskilled, unsocial or poorly paid jobs which could not be filled locally. Generally, therefore, the jobs of the newly settled immigrants have not been determined by their qualifications, skills, and experience, but by gaps in local labor markets. So the primary cause of immigration was the needs of workplaces, and now many workplaces are, in turn, a reflection of the new multiethnic pattern of urban life which has resulted from this labor market immigration. But the particular circumstances and pattern of this immigration have varied significantly between different countries as has the pattern of settlement of families and dependants during the 1970s. Britain is different in some respects from the rest of Western Europe, and both are quite different from the United States, Canada and Australia.

Multiethnic workplaces are among those strategic research sites referred to in Chapter 1 which exemplify the problems of intergroup communication in modern industrial society. This paper arises from observation, analysis, and training programs related to communication in such multiethnic workplaces, particularly where numbers of South Asian people are employed. The first part of this chapter provides empirical background to some of the case studies in this volume and places them in a socioeconomic perspective.