The Equal Opportunities Revolution
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The Equal Opportunities Revolution
The Equal Opportunities Revolution
James Heartfield
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: The Old Order
Chapter Two: The Commission for Race Equality
Chapter Three: The Equal Opportunities Commission
Chapter Four: Equal Opportunities at Work – How They Came About
Chapter Five: Reactions
Chapter Six: Human Resource Management
Chapter Seven: The Policy and the Working Class
Chapter Eight: Sources of Discrimination Outside the Workplace
Chapter Nine: International and Historical Precedents
Chapter Ten: Mainstreaming Equal Opportunities
Chapter Eleven: Contradictions in the System
Conclusion
Notes
Preface
Somewhere between 1965 and 2005 British attitudes on race and sex discrimination went through a sea-change. Broadly, the common belief that white people were better than black people, and that men were better than women, was challenged. There are many sides to that challenge, but this book just looks at one, equal opportunities in the workplace. Before the 1970s there were no workplaces that had equal opportunities policies. Today, the great majority of people at work are covered by such a policy – as they are covered by many acts of parliament drafted to guarantee equality at work.
There are a great many books written about diversity at work. Many of these are handbooks for employers and human resource managers, or they are addressed to employees and their representatives. As valuable as those are, they do not show the change that took place in the later part of the twentieth century. Talking to students about these questions many are generally aware that social attitudes in the past were very different. But it is harder for them to see how it was that things changed. The publications about discrimination at work do not address the question why equal opportunities policies arose, what the social conditions were that led to their success.
This book is written as a history, drawn from published sources. It also relies a lot on my own records and recollections of the time, and those of my peers. It is strange to see arguments that were only just developing when I was younger settle down to become the basis of policies and practices that govern society today. The questions of inequality were urgent as I was growing up, when the country was fixated on immigration, its supposed threat to jobs, and also on the growing numbers of women at work, and the imagined damage that would do to family life. As students we protested against discrimination – I was thrown out of college after one occupation demanding nurseries for students with children. In the 1980s I worked at Haringey Council, which was at the centre of a great row with the government about equal opportunities for ethnic minorities, and then again about gay rights. The industrial struggles that were common in the 1970s carried on, right up to year-long miners’ strike against pit closures. But more and more, the argument in society was about oppression and discrimination, as well as about workers’ pay and conditions. I was only a bit-player in the culture wars of the 1980s, but they did unfold around me. The book draws on my experiences, and those of the many people alongside whom I worked and campaigned over questions of discrimination and workers’ rights over three decades. In particular I have leant on the advice and wisdom of Daniel Ben-Ami, Rosie Cuckston, Phil Hammond, Eve Kay, Chris Kyriakides, Kenan Malik, Munira Mirza, Mick Owens and Kevin Yuill. I am indebted too to Lizzie Terry and Tariq Goddard whose interest in this story helped the writing of it.
The book also draws on documents that I am embarrassed to think of now as historical sources, having seen them the first time around as so many surplus newsletters and policy briefs, often heading for the wastepaper bin. The work of the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission, as well as the many local authority and employers’ working groups on equality, were not well-respected at the time. They were often seen by conservatives as ‘social engineering’ and by radicals as tokenism — both criticisms that had some point. When I contacted the press office of the Human Rights Commission they were unaware of any history of their predecessor commissions (though there are in fact some retrospective accounts, as in the 25th Annual Report of the CRE). In reconstructing their history, and that of the other local government and workplace bodies dealing with equal opportunities, my argument is that these organisations did have a greater impact than they are credited for, though the changes they heralded were also pushed forward by other changes in the way that work is organised.
Back then, many of us were pessimistic about the likelihood that the market system, capitalism, could be reformed, most especially in its dependence on discrimination against women and against black people. The case against oppression was one that seemed to demand a revolution against the whole social order. A revolution did take place, but not the one that we were hoping for. The revolution in workplace relations has been profound. It was a revolution that did not overthrow the market system, but instead perfected it. Many of the things that we thought were unlikely to happen under capitalism, like a general belief in equality between men and women, and even a general belief in equality between white and black, did happen. The discrimination that we thought was going to get worse, got better. But the improvement of the position of women relative to men, and of black people relative to white people, took place in the context of a worsening of the position of all working people, relative to their employers. The position of the working classes overall, which we hoped would get better, has gotten much worse. Trying to understand the contradictions of the equal opportunities revolution is what we set out to do here.
Introduction
‘Equal opportunities’ policies were first modelled in Britain in the early 1980s. In 1980, the Commission for Racial Equality listed 73 employers who had adopted their draft equal opportunities policy. By 2004, three quarters of all workplaces had a formal written equal opportunities policy, up from 64% in 1998.1
Equal opportunities policies were designed to address discrimination against women and ethnic minorities at work. These are policies adopted by firms. They include promises not to discriminate, equal pay for equal work, oversight of recruitment policies and of promotions, and monitoring of the ethnic and gender mix of the workforce.
Before there were any such policies, there were laws against discrimination, notably the 1970 Equal Pay Act, the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act and the 1976 Race Relations Act (there were predecessors, and there have been reforms afterwards, but these are the most important). Both laws created quangos to enforce non-discrimination, which were known at the time as the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission. Both had powers to investigate and to find against individual employers.
Though the EOC and the CRE were important enforcement bodies, the adoption of equal opportunities policies by firms signalled the dissemination and generalisation of a culture of equal opportunities. This is a sea change in British employment law and practice. Discrimination had been woven into the workplace to a remarkable degree in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Today women are nearly half the workforce, and the gender pay gap is shrinking all the time. Employers have taken on many more black people, too, and the racially segregated workplaces that were common up into the 1970s are today exceptional.
Catherine Hakim called this change an ‘equal opportunities revolution’, and she is right. Whatever problems remain, it is hard to gainsay that the explicit promises and beliefs of mainstream British society are for equality of opportunity. It is a revolution bec
ause oppression in the home, at the borders, and in the ghettos had been a mainstay of British society, and one that shaped the world of work. A gender and racial division of labour made a hierarchy in which women and migrants were marginal workers. That hierarchy is being dismantled. More importantly, it has no significant, explicit defenders among the political or business elite.
Whether the change was caused by the new policies, or whether those policies were only symptomatic of the extensive recruitment of women and of black people, the evidence is that a profound change has taken place. We are, of course, still impatient at the persistence of discrimination, and rightly so. All the same, the distance travelled over the last 30 years is remarkable.
The paradox of the equal opportunities revolution is that very few people expected it to succeed. Most of those who worked for equal opportunities from the late 1970s on were either liberal or radical. These were people, for the most part, who saw the 1980s and 1990s as a depressing time, when progress had been thrown into reverse. For workplace organisation this was a time when trade unions lost their legal privileges and were pointedly attacked by employers, with the support of the government. Anti-trade union laws put workers’ representatives on the back foot. In the country, the tenor of government was hostile to working women and to ethnic minorities.
Curbs on welfare payments and social services as well as on nursery provision all hurt women who were trying to work. The governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major talked about a return to ‘Victorian values’ and ‘back to basics’, seeming to suggest a far greater sympathy with traditional family life. At the same time harsh measures against immigrants, aggressive policing of inner cities, and a preoccupation with British values all seemed to point to a retrograde attitude toward black people.
And yet, the era of those Conservative governments, between 1979 and 1996, was just when the equal opportunities revolution was underway. This is the time when there was the greatest take-up of equal opportunities policies at work. The attitude of the government to those changes was mixed. Some in the Conservative Party were outspoken in their hostility to the equal opportunities policies adopted by local authorities, which they decried as ‘social engineering’. There were moments when it seemed that both the CRE and the EOC would be targeted by a hostile government, and even abolished. The Greater London Council, which had been a pioneer of equal opportunities policies, was abolished, and much of the criticism of the GLC that preceded the abolition highlighted its ‘loony-left’ policies on race and gender.
For all that, the government never did abolish the CRE or the EOC, and the Department of Employment quietly supported their efforts to promote equal opportunities policies. More importantly, leading businesses, at first cautiously, and then enthusiastically, embraced the equal opportunities revolution. By 1998, 55% of all private business had equal opportunities policies (rising to 68% in 2004). All the other reforms of industry and employment law were pulling the country to the right. But the incremental reforms under the heading of equal opportunities carried on.
Most of the political left’s policies seemed to be out of keeping with the times. There was not great support for economic planning, or trade union power — not even among trade unionists. But there was increasing sympathy for equal opportunities. These policies seemed to chime well with the other innovations that were taking place at work. Codes of practice, legalisation, tribunals, monitoring, all seemed commensurate with the new discipline of Human Resource Management. HRM saw personnel departments take on much of the work of managing relations between employers and employees that had formerly been done through negotiations with trade unions. Social scientist Alan Wolfe said that in the 1990s the right won the economic war and the left won the cultural war. One clear sign of that is the integration of the goal of equal opportunities within a restructured economy.
Trying to understand why the equal opportunities revolution happened, when the conditions seemed so hostile to such change, is one of the goals of this book.
All change at work
Between 1950 and 2015 the regime of workplace organisation has been through a sea change. Back then women made up just 35% of the workforce. Since then women’s share in employment has climbed markedly to around 46% today.
Source: ONS
Between 1991 and 2011 the percentage of ‘White British’ residents in England and Wales fell from 94% to 86%. In England and Wales, a workforce of 25.7 million now includes 3 million non-white workers.2
Go further back and see that in Britain at the start of the twentieth century just one tenth of married women worked, compared with 60% in 1990. Though Britain in 1900 governed an empire of 350 million, including India, much of Africa, and the Caribbean, the black presence in the United Kingdom was relatively small, until migration from the West Indies (from 1948), East Africa (of Asians from 1967), India, and Pakistan began. Net migration to the United Kingdom between 1961 and 2011 was 2,149,000, more latterly coming from Africa and Eastern Europe.3
On the basis of these changes, the Home Office claimed in 2002 that Britain was ‘a more pluralistic society’ and a ‘multicultural society’, and further that ‘today very few people believe that women in Britain should stay at home and not go out to work’.4
The change in the make-up of British society, and most importantly in its workforce, has many causes. They are: agitation on the part of women and black workers, full employment and economic restructuring; and these changes are clearly marked by laws on race and sex discrimination, enforced by dedicated government bodies, and adopted as workplace codes by most employers. These legal codes forbid discrimination and unequal pay for equal work — and much more. Just what the forces were that gave rise to these changes is the subject of this book.
The change in the composition of the British workforce was sharply contested. As we will explain in Chapter One, the particular settlement between employers and labourers in the early twentieth century was exclusive, resting on an overwhelmingly white and male workforce that had established its rights and position over many years. Later, as women and then black workers were introduced into the workforce, labour relations were markedly hierarchical, as these newer recruits were employed in defined areas, and on worse terms.
The old labour regime was not deliberately constructed by any single agent to be the way that it was. Nobody sat down and planned a largely white, male labour force. Rather it came about out of the distinctive social position of the core industrial workforce, and the way that they fought to establish their authority within the workplace. But if it was not deliberately designed to be exclusive, discriminatory, and hierarchical, once in place it was. What is more, many agents, employers, governments, and even trade union representatives often used the shape of the settlement to defend their own positions, often to the detriment of those women and black people who were disadvantaged.
The unravelling of the established gender and racial ordering of the workforce, and its reconstruction, is a long and complicated story, and it is by no means complete. All the same that sea change in the working lives and broader society of Britain has been remarkable. In this book we look at the equal opportunities revolution as a real, historical event, to try to understand the actions and decisions that people took that made it happen.
The original meaning of ‘equality of opportunity’, and how it changed
Before the legislation of the 1970s the concept of ‘equal opportunity’ had a distinctive meaning. Equal opportunity, a shortening of ‘equality of opportunity’, came into use in the late nineteenth century as liberals sought to show how they were not like socialists. Henry Broadhurst explained the meaning of ‘True Liberalism’: ‘Liberalism does not seek to make all men equal; nothing can do that. But its object is to remove all obstacles erected by men which prevent all having equal opportunities.’5
At that time, of course, the Liberals were facing down an emerging challenge from the labour movement, which was demanding equality. The liberal pres
s parodied that as ‘levelling’. Liberal Party-supporting trade union leader Henry Broadhurst was saying that he was not levelling all people down to the same point, but giving them ‘equality of opportunity’. (Note that the inequality being looked at is social inequality, between ‘men’.)
The Reverend J. J. R. Armitage, the Munitions Area Chaplain, lectured on the meaning of ‘Equality’ at the Empire Theatre, Coventry during the First World War. Armitage was sure that ‘the doctrine of equality had no sanction from science or from experience’. On the other hand, the ‘clergy and the Church of God, without fear or favour, had through the centuries preached to the all-powerful ruling classes that the lowest soul was in the eyes of Heaven of equal value with the highest’. He said ‘they should endeavour to make it possible for every boy, without restraint of class privilege or birth, to go wherever his talent leads him’. If only we could ‘grant equality of opportunity and the way was opened in competition’.6
In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Viscount Hinchingbrooke was talking to the Bradford Rotary Club about the Conservative Party of the future. Lord Hinchingbrooke ‘urged the desirability of a society in which an individual, in whatever circumstances he might be placed, would have full scope to use his abilities in service of his fellow man’. ‘Equality of opportunity’, he said, ‘therefore became one of our war aims — by which all might attain to positions of highest endeavour in service to their fellows’.7 In raising the ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’ Viscount Hinchingbrooke was trying to head off the more socialistic aims of the Beveridge Report, of which he thought Britons ought to be wary.
In all these instances, equal opportunities are set out as the fulfilment of the free market; equality of opportunity is the counter-claim to the socialist demand for equality. To get rid of unfair discrimination is to make the labour market more perfect.