The Equal Opportunities Revolution
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This was the meaning, too, of Milton Friedman’s 1979 distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Noting that the American Declaration of Independence seemed to put in train two rival principles, Liberty and Equality, Friedman explains: ‘In the early decades of the Republic, equality meant equality before God; liberty meant the liberty to shape one’s own life.’ More, Friedman says: ‘Equality came more and more to be interpreted as “equality of opportunity” in the sense that no one should be prevented by arbitrary obstacles from using his capacities to pursue his own objectives.’ He goes on to say: ‘Neither equality before God nor equality of opportunity presented any conflict with liberty to shape one’s own life’ — that is they were commensurate with a free labour market.8 He expands, later on:
Equality of opportunity, like personal equality, is not inconsistent with liberty; on the contrary, it is an essential component of liberty. If some people are denied access to particular positions in life for which they are qualified simply because of their ethnic background, color, or religion, that is an interference with their right to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It denies equality of opportunity and, by the same token, sacrifices the freedom of some for the advantage of others.9
Friedman contrasts equality of opportunity with another idea of equality that he differentiates by giving it different qualifier, ‘equality of outcome’:
A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades — equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same level of living or of income, should finish the race at the same time. Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty.10
Equality of opportunity was a call often linked with education, as in 1914 when Mr Henry Davies, the Glamorgan Director of Mining, appealed to the Miner’s Federation to get behind a school set up by mine-owners. ‘There was to be equality of opportunity for all’, said Davies, ‘the miner’s son, the checkweigher’s son would have the same advantages of the manager’s son’.11 In 1917 a National Union of Teachers’ leader Mr H. Walker called for the raising of the school leaving age, at a meeting of the Labour Club, backed by councillor J. Thicket, who said ‘there should be equality of opportunity for the children of rich and poor alike’.12
The idea of ‘equality of opportunity’ had been worked out as a liberal answer to labour. Later on, the moderate left took it up themselves as a form of words that seemed to be a concession to egalitarianism. In the House of Lords, Labour peer Lord Haldane attacked an anti-union law proposed as a reaction to the General Strike of 1926. The General Strike was wrong, said Haldane — ‘never again if it could be prevented would such a blow be struck at the heart of the country’ — but things would never be satisfactory ‘until workmen and employers come to be more of one mind than at present’. Arguing for such a meeting of minds, Haldane said ‘workmen desired to have the opportunity of making the best of their lives and securing for themselves the best conditions of their labour… Working people asked not for luxuries, but for equality of opportunity, and they desired that still more on behalf of their wives and children.’13
The phrase ‘equality of opportunity’ was first used as a challenge against sex discrimination toward women teachers. For them, equality of opportunity had keen meaning because of the rule that they were to be laid off if and when they married (on the assumption that they would be supported by their husbands, and that their leaving would free up jobs for men). Miss S. M. Burls told the 1929 annual conference of the National Union of Women Teachers that they ‘demanded freedom to apply for every post in the educational sphere’, and ‘impartiality which considered immaterial questions of sex or celibacy, and the justice which awarded equal remuneration and equal opportunities of promotion’. A woman’s marriage, she said, should be treated ‘as her private concern just as all the world treats a man’s’.14 At a meeting of the Plymouth Women’s Hospital Fund, chair Dr Mabel Ramsay said ‘medical women occupied an excellent position in Plymouth, but they would not be satisfied until they got the same opportunities as those given to men’, and they ‘could not stop until every avenue was open to all women’.15
Equal opportunities in an era of full employment
The Labour Party manifesto in 1950 said ‘Our appeal is to all those useful men and women who actively contribute to the work of the nation’. They called on manual, skilled, technical, and professional workers, ‘and housewives and women workers of all kinds’. The Labour Party set out its goal of realising the ‘means to the greater end of the full and free development of every individual person’. In the context of full employment, the manifesto committed themselves: ‘Labour will encourage the introduction of equal pay for equal work by women when the nation’s economic circumstances allow it.’16 The Conservatives were a little more cautious, restricting their offer of equal pay — ‘principle of equal pay for men and women for services of equal value’ — to public employees, and also limiting it to what could be afforded.17 Five years later, Labour’s promises were vaguer, offering that ‘our goal is a society in which free and independent men and women work together as equals’, but without any proposals to make that happen.18 Women did not feature very much in the Labour Party’s electoral appeals, though in 1964 the “New Britain” they foresaw would rely on ‘encouraging more entrants to teaching and winning back the thousands of women lost by marriage’ (it was an offer that was adopted by the Conservatives at the following election). Nancy Seear was an economist and former personnel manager, who had been on the Production Efficiency Board at the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the war. She advised that ‘if we want to find an unused reserve of potential qualified manpower it is among women that it can most easily be discovered’.19
Two years later, and again with ‘full employment’ as the background, Labour put down a marker:
[W]e must move towards greater fairness in the rewards for work. That is why we stand for equal pay for equal work and, to this end, have started negotiations.
We cannot be content with a situation in which important groups — particularly women, but male workers, too, in some occupations — continue to be underpaid.
In 1966 the Conservatives did say ‘we intend that there should be full equality of opportunity’, though it was not linked to any specific measures, but rather an argument for a more competitive economy in which we should not ‘all be equally held back to the pace of the slowest’. At the same time, they appealed to women as homemakers more than they did as potential wage earners, promising that ‘we want to see family life strengthened by our Conservative social policies’.20
The TUC Congress in September 1965 followed this with a resolution reaffirming
its support for the principles of equality of treatment and opportunity for women workers in industry, and call[ing] upon the General Council to request the government to implement the promise of ‘the right to equal pay for equal work’ as set out in the Labour Party election manifesto.21
Labour won office in 1964 and showed themselves willing to adopt some cautious measures against discrimination in the 1965 Race Relations Act. Then in 1970 they made the following manifesto statement on equal opportunities, which in its main outlines anticipated the legislative framework that was to follow, and would shape our current employment regime:
[W]e believe that all people are entitled to be treated as equals: that women should have the same opportunities and rewards as men. We insist, too, that society should not discriminate against minorities on grounds of religion or race or colour: that all should have equal protection under the law and equal opportunity for advancement in and service to the community.
Labour’s commitments were ahead of the Conservatives’ though these too were sharply opposed to discrimination. The Conservative Party under Edward Heath also committed itself: ‘We have supported and sought to improve the equal pay legislation.’ Heath’s Conservatives said they wanted to ‘ensure genuine equality of opportunity’. They despa
ired that ‘many barriers still exist which prevent women from participating to the full in the entire life of the country’, and that ‘women are treated by the law, in some respects, as having inferior rights to men’, promising ‘we will amend the law to remove this discrimination’.22
In 1974, Harold Wilson put his name to Labour’s election appeal. The main thrust of the manifesto was for greater control by the British people over the powerful private forces dominating economic life, and for an extensive incorporation of industrial relations.
Alongside those demands, Wilson set out another area of policy, saying ‘it is the duty of Socialists to protect the individual from discrimination on whatever grounds’. Under the heading ‘Women and Girls’, he said that they ‘must have an equal status in education, training, employment, social security, national insurance, taxation, property ownership, matrimonial and family law’. Further, he promised that ‘we shall create the powerful legal machinery necessary to enforce our anti-discrimination laws’.23 The following October, Labour could say ‘new rights for women and our determination to implement equal pay have been announced’.
Britain’s first Race Relations Act was passed in 1965, but its remit was modest. It was the Race Relations Act of 1976 that made race discrimination illegal and created the Commission for Racial Equality with powers to investigate employers to persuade them to redress the balance. Six years earlier, in 1970, the Equal Pay Act had been passed — following a strike by women machinists at Ford’s Dagenham plant demanding parity with equivalent workers on the assembly line. A further act of 1975 created the Equal Opportunities Commission that had powers to investigate and reprimand employers and other institutions for discrimination. These Commissions were both non-departmental public bodies.
With the legislative commitment, the stage was set for the revolution in equal opportunities that was to follow. As we shall see, one of the most far-reaching consequences of the legislation, and the Commissions it created, was the adoption of equal opportunities policies by employers. These policies were the third leg of the stool alongside the law and the Commissions. In themselves they were just pieces of paper — though they also tended to reorganise and even lend greater importance to personnel management, particularly in larger companies, as managers committed to take on the responsibility of enforcing the policies. They might be actively embraced by far-sighted employers, or taken on without much thought, or even reluctantly, for fear of sanctions under the law. But once in place they were a framework through which employers and employees, unions and Commissions, could negotiate the new working conditions. Their widespread adoption in the 1980s and 1990s gave institutional form to the equal opportunities revolution.
The elusive victory
Agents of the equal opportunities revolution — activists, officials, analysts, politicians — more often talk down the successes than talking them up. How could one be satisfied with anything less than equality? As Rebecca Solnit writes, we need the ‘ability to recognize a situation in which you are travelling and have not arrived, in which you have both cause to celebrate and fight’.24
The equal opportunities revolution has been superimposed upon the old corporatist order of business, and has never wholly eclipsed it. So too, the inequalities between men and women, and between white and black, are greatly moderated but have not disappeared. How could it be otherwise? Equal opportunities does not imply equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity in the sense of greater competition has increased social inequality in income, as measured in the ‘Gini coefficient’ (0=equality, 1=inequality).
Source: Mike Brewer et al, Accounting for changes in inequality since 1968, Institute of Fiscal Studies, 2009, p 1
The income gap between wealthy and less so has opened up, and to some extent that is associated with the inequalities of race and sex. Even if all racial discrimination were to cease, since socio-economic status tends to reflect the socio-economic status of parents, black people by their incomes, on average lower, will still raise children who are less likely to succeed than their white counterparts. That would be so because colour would still be a marker of class, even if there were no active discrimination. For women, the income penalty of leaving full-time employment to raise children persists stubbornly despite many measures (such as the legal right to paternal leave). But for the most part, women have improved their position relative to men, and black people have improved their position relative to white, over time. The distant horizon of equality of outcome has not been reached, and campaigners’ determination to press onwards is both understandable and laudable. But the perspective of the campaigner is not one that illuminates just how far we have come over just a few decades.
On average women earned 36.5% less than men per hour in 1970, compared to 15% less than men in 2010.25
There are two ways to measure the gender pay gap. If you compare the earnings of men and women in full-time employment, the gap today is quite small, and has fallen over some years. The other way, which compares all hourly earnings, gives a larger pay gap because more women work in part-time employment, and part-time employment is less well paid by the hour. The striking thing, however, is that while hourly pay for all workers gives a larger gender pay gap, the same trend towards convergence is there in both measures. The gender pay gap is closing.
Source: ONS
The ethnic pay gap, by contrast has worsened somewhat in the last ten years. However, the position of some established ethnic minorities, at least as reflected in the ethnic pay gap, is more encouraging.
According to the estimates, the ethnic gap in hourly average pay between white men and Indians, black Caribbean, and Chinese men is statistically insignificant. These minorities are well established, and their disadvantage in employment in earlier times is well recorded, but more recently they appear to have overcome those barriers. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are more recent arrivals, and they are at a clear disadvantage in the jobs market, as are Pakistanis (suggesting that Muslims in particular are at a disadvantage in the workforce today). The social science researchers who looked at the ethnic pay gap saw one of the principle barriers to advance being the concentration of these minorities in particular, and precarious, occupations — black disadvantage being closely linked to class.26
This book is mostly about relations at work. The equal opportunities policy is a workplace policy. Like the sex- and racebased hierarchies that went before, equal opportunities policies are about managing all employees, white and black, men and women. In what follows we look first at the old regime that was overturned by the equal opportunities revolution, in Chapter One. This chapter is quite detailed, explaining how sex and race discrimination came to be built in to the old ‘corporatist’, or ‘tripartite’ order of industrial relations. Then we go on to look first at the question of race, the creation of the Commission for Racial Equality and the promulgation of equal opportunities policies at work in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three we go on to look at the question of women, the Equal Opportunities Commission and its impact upon employment practice. In Chapter Four we consider the revolution in workplace relations overall, and ask what the motives were for employers who adopted these policies. The fifth chapter looks at some of the critical reaction to equal opportunities policies, both conservative criticisms and radical ones. In Chapter Six we consider the way that equal opportunities policies came as part and parcel of the new Human Resource Management theory of workplace relations. Chapter Seven looks at the way that the organised labour movement was at odds with the changes at work, and how the economic cycle impacted on employment, for men and women, and for black and white. Many looking at these questions have showed that influences outside work, in particular the ‘second shift’ of domestic work for women and Britain’s institutional racism, have entrenched discrimination — and we look at these in Chapter Eight, though drawing attention too to the ways that even those barriers are being moved. Chapter Nine looks at the different examples that British policy makers had to
draw on, of native self-government in the British Empire, of the Fair Employment Commission in Northern Ireland, affirmative action in the United States, and the work of the European Union on women’s equality. In Chapter Ten we look at how the equal opportunities model was generalised in workplace rights for lesbians and gays and for the disabled, and also how, paradoxically, the generalisation of the model made the EOC and the CRE redundant. Chapter Eleven looks at some of the contradictions in the system that has been created by the equal opportunities revolution.
There is a kind of awkwardness that comes from looking at all the social questions that fall under the equal opportunities category together. The two most important equal opportunities questions: those of discrimination against women, and of discrimination against black people, are matters in their own right. The case for considering them under the same heading is that they really are under the same heading, as the two substantial questions addressed in equal opportunities policies. They are very different, though. Sex cuts through society across the question of class, at a right angle to it, as it were. There are women in the upper classes, and women in the working classes. Race, while it is not the same as class, tends to track social inequality much more directly. Women’s oppression in the family has been a feature of the life of elites, and of working-class people — the inequality is reproduced in each family unit. There have been wealthy black people, and even black people in the ruling elites (though very few might be counted as such in Britain). On the other hand, the social status of black people has been shaped by their relationship to a division of labour that is outside of the home (which is not of course to say that the question of the domestic economy and women’s relationship to it is not an issue for black people). Proportionately, black and Asian people are fewer, pointedly fewer, than the white population (around 87% of the population of the United Kingdom), so that they have at times been referred to as ‘the minorities’; there are fewer black and Asian people than there are women, who, though they have in occasional mistakes been referred to as a minority, are in fact the majority. For that reason, the question of equality for women has probably been more important, not morally, but in its weight within British society, and so too have changes in the balance of power between the sexes.