The Equal Opportunities Revolution

by James Heartfield

  It seemed like an optimistic hope. The Conservative government was not known for its progressive stance on race. A leading cadre of police chiefs — Kenneth Oxford in Liverpool, James Anderton in Manchester, and Kenneth Newman in London — did much to harass and criminalise West Indian youths, in a rising campaign of persecution.24 Immigration law was tightened and its enforcement ramped up. The government’s message to the country led most to expect more state-sanctioned race discrimination, rather than any serious mitigation of it.

  After David Lane, the Commission chairman Peter Newsam served until 1986, when Michael Day, who had been a senior probation officer, took over. In 1993, the first black chair of the Commission, Herman Ouseley, was appointed by Home Secretary Tom Clarke. Ouseley seemed to be a radical choice (see below) but he had shown himself to be a stabilising force as Chief Executive of the Inner London Education Authority (overseeing its abolition, in fact) and in the same role for the troubled Lambeth Council. The CRE under Michael Day had suffered dissensions with one member of staff accusing the Commission itself of racial discrimination.25

  Ouseley was knighted in 1997, and handed over the chairmanship to Gurbux Singh. Singh’s range of experience was narrower than his predecessor’s. He had worked as a policy officer at the Commission, and he had been Chief Executive of Haringey Council. Singh had shown some willingness to criticise the government over its asylum policies. Singh was arrested while drinking at a cricket match, and demanded of the policeman ‘Do you know who I am?’, and then later threatened to get the officer sacked, as he knew the Chief of Police, Ian Blair. The scandal was too great and Singh resigned. The last chair of the Commission for Racial Equality was Trevor Phillips who took over in 2003. Phillips, who had been a television producer and former President of the National Union of Students, was a figure of some stature, a respected campaigner against racism, but also something of a maverick. Phillips served up until the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission were combined as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and then went on to chair that body.

  David Lane, Peter Newsam

  In 1986 the Commission for Racial Equality under Peter Newsam had a staff of 205 and a budget of £10.5 million — of which a quarter was granted to local Community Relations Councils. By the year 2000 the budget had increased to £16.6 million and the staff complement had hardly changed.

  Over its 30 years, the Commission for Racial Equality was often criticised, and even mocked for its bureaucratic tokenism — criticisms that often seemed to have a point. But over those 30 years, public attitudes and policy shifted; they shifted slowly, glacially slowly it seemed, but in the end, pointedly in favour of race equality. Most remarkable of all changes was the change in the country’s workplaces in favour of the idea of equality of opportunity. It was not that racism was abolished — far from it. But grounds on which race discrimination could take force from official sanction were pared back further and further. To what extent the Commission was a symptom of those changes, and to what extent it was a cause, is not always clear. When we come to look at the transformation that was taking place in the world of work we can give a better answer to that question. All the same, the curious institutional innovation that was the Commission for Racial Equality would play its part, as well as being a model for that other important body, the Equal Opportunities Commission.

  — THREE —

  The Equal Opportunities Commission

  ‘Equal pay is the oldest wage claim in the history of the British trade union movement’, the TUC President John Newton told its first ever equal pay conference in 1968.1

  The call for equal pay was first made by matchgirls’ strike leader Annie Besant in the 1890s, and raised at trade union congresses many times since. In the Second World War the claims made by Esther Lahr and others in the Transport and General Workers Union were reported in the papers: ‘The government was today urged to give women the same pay and conditions as men.’2 After the war the Trades Union Congress took a traditionalist line, arguing that

  the home is one of the most important spheres for a woman worker and that it would be doing a great injury to the life of the nation if women were persuaded or forced to neglect their domestic duties in order to enter industry particularly where there are young children to cater for.

  The TUC agreed to the Labour government’s closing wartime nurseries, and said that equal pay was ‘inappropriate at the present time’ because of ‘the continuing need for counter inflationary policies’.3

  A Civil Service Commission of 1948 tentatively suggested equal pay, while worrying about the ‘psychological impact’ on men. The women on the Committee, though, put in a minority report saying ‘the claims of justice between individuals and the development of national productivity point in the same direction’ — equal pay.4 By 1955 staff unions had negotiated equal pay in the civil service and in the Post Office, though inequality in grades and promotions was untouched.

  In the quarter century after the Second World War the economy grew strongly and more women went to work. Between 1964 and 1970 women made up 70% of the growth in trade union membership. The shop workers’ union USDAW won the Trades Union Congress to a resolution for equal pay in 1963, leading to an Industrial Charter for women that called for equal pay, equal opportunities for training, re-training facilities for women returning to industry, and special provisions for the health and welfare of women at work.5 The following year the Labour Party pledged new laws on equal pay.6 In 1965 the TUC resolved

  its support for the principles of equality of treatment and opportunity for women workers in industry, and call[ed] 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.

  The unions’ attention to equal pay and sex discrimination helped them to recruit more members. Between 1968 and 1978, the number of women in the public employees’ union (NUPE) more than trebled, that of the local government officers’ union NALGO more than doubled, that of the health service union COHSE quadrupled, and the white-collar workers’ union ASTMS multiplied its female membership by seven times.7

  The changing mood over equal pay spread to the professions, too. Baroness Seear had worked at the Production Efficiency Board at the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the Second World War, having been a personnel officer at Clarks before. Afterwards she taught at the London School of Economics, where she championed women’s employment, writing in 1964 that ‘if we want to find an unused reserve of potential qualified manpower it is among women that it can most easily be discovered’.8 More women were going on to higher education courses, where some were founding women’s groups, like the London Women’s Liberation Workshop, reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and publishing the magazine Shrew. In the 1970s, women at Ruskin College organised the first Women’s Liberation Movement conference.

  The events that led to the two laws on Equal Pay (1970) and Sex Discrimination (1975), creating the Equal Opportunities Commission, can best be understood in the context of the heightened social conflict of the day. The Labour governments of 1964-71 and 1974-79 were in the grip of a revolt from below embodied in a number of unofficial strikes. That the focus of sex discrimination law was pay was because of inequality, and also because pay was the issue of the decade.

  Women’s Liberation Movement conference, Birmingham, 1978

  Women played a big part in the militancy of the late 1960s and ’70s. They were active in strikes at Rolls Royce and Rootes in 1968, of the London Night Cleaners over union recognition in 1970, and in the teachers’ strikes as well as the Leeds Garment Workers’ strike of that year. The following year saw a London telephonists’ pay dispute. In 1972 women joined the occupations of Fisher-Bendix on Merseyside and Briant Colour Printing in London. Women at Goodman’s, part of Thorn Electrical Industries, successfully struck for equal pay. In 1973 hundreds o
f thousands of hospital workers, mostly women, went on their first ever national strike. In the same year 200 women in GEC, Coventry, struck for eight weeks over piece rates.9 Many of these strikes were backed by an umbrella group, the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights. The most important of these conflicts was the strike by women machinists, stitching the upholstery in Ford’s works in Dagenham, East London, which is generally credited with changing the law.

  The Dagenham strike and the Equal Pay Act

  The Labour Minister responsible for employment in the 1964-70 government was Barbara Castle, who would propose the equality legislation. Her main role, though, was to face down the trade union demands of men and women. Some in the government, like Peter Shore and economic adviser Tommy Balogh, came to think that if socialism meant a planned economy, then that should mean that rates of pay should be set by the state, too. Others like Jim Callaghan, who had been a trade union leader before he was a Member of Parliament, argued for ‘free collective bargaining’ against state intervention in the rights of trade unions to strike their own pay deals. The different sides of the argument were not exactly clear at first, and did not fit with the obvious ideas of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the party. Barbara Castle, having come from the left, was between the two positions, but as the Minister she argued the case for an incomes policy, setting her at odds with the trade unions, usually in the person of their largely male leaders.

  The incomes policy that Castle fronted, ‘In Place of Strife’, hurt her standing in the labour movement, casting her as the mean witch holding down workers’ pay. She had to defend government intervention against the trade unions, whittling away at her socialist credentials. The strike at Dagenham was ‘the dispute that marked the start of her disenchantment with trade unions’.10

  The women struck at Ford Dagenham over the way their work had been graded, not specifically about equal pay, though the way that management had not recognised their skills was discriminatory. The strike was a blow to Castle because it came just as Ford and the unions were signing off on a ‘no strike’ deal that the government had put its weight behind. Castle called the union leaders in to talk about what had gone wrong, and ‘asked them what they could do to help get the women back to work’. In her diaries Castle was scathing when the engineering leader Reg Birch told her ‘equal pay was the policy of his union’. For Castle, the issue was the agreement with Ford, while Birch insisted that ‘new issues have been thrown up since it was signed’. Castle thought ‘this, of course, is a recipe for anarchy’.11

  Though her first thought was to end the Dagenham women’s strike, Castle was uneasy. She sent the whole issue back to a Court of Inquiry, but that was taking a long time, while the strikers were getting good press. Seeing that things were moving too slowly, Castle writes, ‘I blew my top, saying emphatically, “This is where I intervene”.’ From her office, she twisted Ford’s arm to regrade the women, which, while hard for them, was not as costly as a long strike would have been. Calling the strikers in, Castle saw the public relations boost.

  ‘She herself sat in the middle of the sofa and gathered them around a large, mumsy tea-pot’, writes biographer Ann Perkins: ‘The photographers came in early, in case the talks went too badly for pictures to be taken later.’12 As Castle wrote at the time,

  The best part of it from my point of view was the genuine rapport I had established with the women. I think I managed to make Government look again as if it consisted of human beings and not just cold-blooded economists.13

  Later she bumped into one of her more radical parliamentary colleagues, who had been critical about the ‘In Place of Strife’ white paper: ‘Glowing congratulations from Eric Heffer about the Ford settlement’, she writes, as he says: ‘This is the kind of intervention I believe in.’14 Castle found that that the equal pay issue was one where an incomes policy was popular. It was also one where the government had moral authority over the unions, not the other way around.

  Soon after the Dagenham strike, another equal pay issue blew up in negotiations between the engineering employers and unions. The women’s pay grade had been left to the end of the talks. The employers were not giving much. The engineers were threatening strike action to get the women more pay. In Castle’s eyes the extravagant claims of the men were to blame: ‘the unions had always understood that there would have to be some concessions by them on the women’s differentials if they pushed up the skilled rate’. Instead, the unions hoped she would lean on the employers to give more. She wrote that she ‘well and truly blew my top, telling them icily that I had been waiting for a long time to hear when they were going to start talking about the women and was shocked to find that they had left it to the very end’.

  Turning on the union side Castle was pleased that she had started a ‘ding dong row’ between engineers’ leader Hugh Scanlon and the only woman on the negotiating team Marion Veitch. She notes that Scanlon was ‘clearly nervous at the success of my attempt to turn the tables on him’. Castle boasts that she has stopped a strike in favour of more pay for the women, and persuaded the men to take a smaller rise.15

  Around this time Barbara Castle was facing the full fury of the unions over the ‘In Place of Strife’ white paper, with its proposals limiting union action, with a cooling-off period, compulsory strike ballots, and penalty clauses for unofficial strikes. Though some radicals, even Tony Benn, backed the proposals, the campaign against them picked up steam.

  In 1969, as the Cabinet prepared policy ahead of the Labour Party Conference, Castle ‘said that my paper on the Industrial Relations Bill could wait but could we clear equal pay urgently?’ At the conference, Castle was pleased to find Transport and General Workers Union leader Jack Jones livid about ‘my announcement about equal pay which robs him not only of a grievance against the Government, but of some of the leadership on industrial issues which, I am now convinced, he wants exclusively concentrated in the hands of the unions’. Staking out new ground on women’s pay, she found, played up the union leaders’ weakness on the issue. Foundry workers’ leader and Labour Party chairman Willie Simpson congratulated Castle on the equal pay proposal, saying ‘the equal pay debate at the TUC… made me sick’: ‘As you say, they’ve been talking about it ever since 1880 and never done anything about it themselves except criticize.’16

  In 1969 Castle was talking to a delegation from the TUC, led by Vic Feather. Castle again grabbed the moral high ground by goading the union leaders for leaving women in the lurch: ‘talking of job opportunity, when were the unions going to give a lead – on allowing women bus drivers, for instance? It’s time we had some militancy, I gibed.’17 While the incomes policy in the ‘In Place of Strife’ white paper was made unworkable by union opposition, the more positive incomes policy of equal pay became law in the last months of the Wilson administration. Its provisions were delayed until 1976 to give employers time to phase in the changes.

  The Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Opportunities Commission

  On its own the Equal Pay Act would not work. Baroness Seear’s research project on the impact of equal pay legislation found that in half of the organisations she surveyed ‘action was taken to minimise the employers’ obligation’: ‘Such minimising action included the creation of new all-female grades, the retitling of jobs and undergrading job evaluations exercises.’18 Equal pay rules meant that women doing ‘like work’ to men would have to be paid the same. But if men got the promotions, or were put on different grades, employers could dodge equal pay; and if women were not given the chance to get the jobs men did, equal pay would mean nothing. Like the Race Relations Act (1976), the Sex Discrimination Act outlawed direct discrimination in hiring, promotion, training, and treatment, alongside the ‘equal pay’ clauses of the 1970 Act.

  The 1976 Act also set up the Equal Opportunities Commission — again, like the Commission for Racial Equality, an arm’s-length independent government agency. The Equal Opportunities Commission had powers to help indi
viduals to seek redress under the Acts at an industrial tribunal. The Commission also had power to investigate organisations, and to issue ‘discrimination orders’ telling them to fix discriminatory policies, and monitoring them.

  For its first ten years the Commission was led by miner’s daughter Betty Lockwood, who had studied at Ruskin College before becoming a Labour Party organiser. Her second-in-command was Elspeth Howe, who stood down in 1980 around the time her husband Geoffrey became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Conservative administration.

  The new organisation started with a modest grant of £850,000, rising to £2.5 million in 1980, when there were 170 people working in its main office in Manchester.19

  In 1977 the Commission pursued actions against ‘W’ Ribbons Ltd, where ‘the grading structure contained women-only grades which were paid less than any male grade’; the Sealed Motor Construction Ltd, where ‘the majority of women were in lowest grade and paid unskilled male rate’; Anderson Mavor Ltd, where ‘a new pay structure was rejected by the Department of Employment; James Robertson and Sons, where ‘a women-only grade work[ed] 40 hours while the men worked 44½ but the difference in pay was too great to be explained by the extra 4½ hours’; Unbrako Ltd, with its ‘completely segregated grading structure with women occupying the lower grades’; Armitage Ware Ltd, where ‘the lowest grade [was] all female’; and many more. The actions also named the unions AUEW, TGWU, USDAW, EETPU, ASTMS, ACTS, and others as the negotiating parties that had agreed the rates and grades of pay. One finding was against the APEX union, which ‘accepted a new unisex structure’. In almost all cases the parties agreed to make changes before any penalty or finding against them was made.20 In one case a formal investigation was opened at the Luton site of Electrolux Limited.