The Equal Opportunities Revolution
Page 10
Municipal innovators
Among the first employers to adopt equal opportunities policies were London municipal authorities, typically those under Labour Party ruling bodies. As the Commission for Racial Equality reported in 1986:
The local government sector has generally been more responsive to the recommendations of the Commission’s Code of Practice in employment than other sectors, whether public or private. Particular authorities, such as the London boroughs of Lambeth, Lewisham and Wandsworth and the cities of Leicester and Bradford have provided a lead in this respect.
Lambeth, and the Greater London Council were soon followed by other Labour-led London Boroughs (Brent, Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Newham, and others), and also the Inner London Education Authority. Later they were followed by larger municipal authorities outside London (Birmingham, Manchester, and so on) and, around the same time, by London Tory-controlled authorities like Barnet and Westminster — ‘over half of the county councils in the South have introduced elements of equal opportunities policy’, said the CRE. By that time equal opportunities policies were also being adopted by larger businesses, like British Telecom, Sainsbury’s, Lloyds, Ford, and so on. In 1985 the Commission for Racial Equality held a two-day residential seminar near Oxford for over 50 delegates from private-sector companies: ‘Speakers from Austin Rover, Boots Company, Midland Bank, Halifax Building Society, Whitbread, Dixons and Tesco gave accounts of their experiences in implementing and monitoring equal opportunities programmes.’1
The reasons that the London local authorities adopted equal opportunities seem to be very political, and they were at the time sharply challenged (we look at the reaction later on). Given that these were politically chosen local leaderships it seems straightforward to look at the adoption of these policies as political acts, which they were. But at the same time local authorities were important and large employers (in the London Borough of Lambeth 10,000 people worked for the Council). Though they seem to have been bending to other winds, the local authorities’ equal opportunities policies were the model for all the policies that were later taken on by commercial businesses. As we shall see, the local authorities’ motives were not so very far from those of the businesses.
The big hill that local Labour councils had to climb in 1979 was Labour’s unpopularity. As the party most closely tied to the corporate society, Labour failed when it failed. Many of its own working-class supporters blamed Labour for the way that the government had failed to back the low-paid workers in the ‘winter of discontent’; the middle classes, on the other hand, blamed Labour for being too soft on the unions and encouraging strikes, and many of them backed the new Conservative government’s drive to limit union power. The old alliances between trade unions and the Labour Party were weakened by the clashes of the Seventies, by the failure of Jim Callaghan’s government to back higher wages, and by the following victory of a stridently anti-union government in 1979.
Labour-led boroughs in the 1980s, especially in London, were not only trying to marshal their forces, but to build new coalitions to hang onto power. The left that came to power in the London Labour Party in the 1980s was often called ‘new left’, as opposed to an ‘old left’ that was based on Labour’s traditional trade union base. Martin Boddy and Colin Fudge cite Doreen Massey’s story of the new left as ‘very different politically: the old labourism dominates the regions’, but ‘new alliances are growing in some cities’; and again they call on the account by labour historian Eric Hobsbawm of how ‘a wide and heterogeneous range of discontented voters can be brought together’, as a social base for a new Labour vote.2
An interview with Ken Livingstone, the Greater London Council leader, finds him telling how Labour’s support had changed: ‘A Labour Party based in the industrial trade unions in the 1940s and 1950s was credible, but the contraction of the industrial base means [it] isn’t an adequate base on its own.’ Said Livingstone, ‘the Labour Party has to change its own structure so that women’s organisations, black organisations, community organisations have a direct input rather than via the trade unions’. At times, and mirroring the rows in the London Labour Party between the right and left, Livingstone could be harsh in his criticism of unions: ‘the craft unions grew up as much out of the benefits of colonialism as British capital did’, he claimed, unfairly, and ‘they’re the ones who laugh loudest about gay rights or feminism, the ones who are most reluctant to give a strong lead over racism’.3 As many saw, Livingstone was trying to reach beyond that shrinking base to appeal to other constituencies. Similar to the model that many Democrats had built in American cities, Livingstone was building a ‘rainbow coalition’. He worked hard to win support from London’s large Afro-Caribbean minority, and appealed to Bengali and other minorities in London, and to women voters.4
In 1982, about 700 ethnic-minority groups in London were written to by Livingston, ‘inviting them to assist in shaping the Council’s policies as they affect the capital’s minority population’. Livingstone took on the role of chairman of the GLC’s Ethnic Minorities Committee, saying that they would be ‘developing the most extensive programme ever embarked upon by a local government with ethnic minorities in London’.5 The Labour group’s optimism about action on discrimination was part of a wider vision of local Keynesian-style public sector-led growth. The Greater London economic plan foresaw more hiring and more opportunities to take on workers who had been overlooked in the past. Many policy-makers in the early Eighties hoped that governments could kick-start economic growth, as was tried in France and Greece. But in time it became clear that London was in for a severe recession, and state spending was cut back, undermining the GLC’s plan.
In Islington, the skirmishes between the more traditional Labour-right leaders on the Council and the more radical activists came to a head when the Labour councillors all defected to the ‘moderate’ breakaway Social Democratic Party — only to lose all their seats in the 1982 election. The voters stuck with the Labour Party, but got new councillors drawn from the more radical end of the party, led by Margaret Hodge and the Trotskyist Alan Clinton, who scrabbled to rebuild local support on the basis of the newer constituencies. In their early race-relations literature, the new Council announced that ‘we are determined to ensure that this workforce accurately reflects the multicultural make-up of the local community’ — it was a statement as much about their hope for popular support as it was about racial justice.6
The pioneer of all of the London councils’ equal opportunities policies was Lambeth Council’s leader from 1978, Ted Knight, who had been on the far left before joining Labour. Lambeth was a borough with a mismatch between its large black minority (around 60,000, or 21%, of 286,000 residents)7 and a local authority that had recruited its staff from an older, whiter population. When Lambeth’s non-manual workforce were surveyed just 8% were Afro-Caribbean, 3% Asian, while 88% were white.8 Under the old order, an order that had after all been built up over years, councils built up their ties to the traditional working class, which was to say, by and large, the white working class. According to one report on discrimination over in East London, ‘neither central nor local government employs a single Asian living in Spitalfields, despite the fact that nearly 20 per cent of the rest of the ward’s population are State employees’.9
The problem that the London Labour councils were struggling with seemed very special to them. But at its heart it was a problem of their legitimacy, in the eyes of their voters and their staff, which is not that different from the problem that other employers faced, the problem of their legitimacy in the eyes of their customers and their employees. Strange as it might have seemed at the time, the ‘extremist experiment’ in ‘social engineering’ of the early Eighties would become the ordinary way of organising workers in the 1990s.
The local councils were struggling with the job of how to hold onto their support in the face of a hostile government. Government hostility was shown in the government trying to cut back on the coun
cils’ public spending, meaning that their ‘rate support grant’ — the extra money they got from central government — would be cut. Councils were in a stronger place where the money they wanted to spend was part of a statutory duty. So it was with spending on race relations. As the Commission for Racial Equality explained,
Section 71 of the Race Relations Act 1976 obliges local authorities to make sure that their various functions are carried out with due regard to the need to eliminate racial discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between people of different racial groups.
On 10 June 1977 the government issued a joint circular to local authorities on the Race Relations Act that drew attention to the provisions of the Act and in particular to the statutory obligations created under Section 71. It said that ‘local authorities will need to examine their policies and practices to ensure that these meet the requirements of the Act’. More, the circular urged local authorities to be positive: ‘Bare compliance with the provisions of the legislation is not enough.’10
The Commission, then, was the council’s ally. Spending on race relations would help them to do the right thing, and win support, and do their duty under the law. That was spending that they could justify. The CRE helped them out: ‘During the reporting period the CRE consulted the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, the Association of District Councils, the London Boroughs Association, the Association of County Councils and the National Association of Community Relations Council.’ All of this consultation led to ‘a pamphlet giving specific and detailed guidance on Section 71’. The message from the CRE was this: ‘The Commission wants local councils not merely to comply with the letter of the law but also to take steps to ensure that no section of the population in their area is disadvantaged by their actions or omissions.’11
In 1978 the Commission for Racial Equality reported that ‘Camden council will declare itself to be “an equal opportunity employer” in all of its recruitment advertisements’. The Council’s statement said that it ‘recognises and welcomes the existence of minority groups in the borough, reflecting a multicultural Britain, and seeks to redress the imbalance of employment opportunities of members of these groups’. Councillor Evans said: ‘Camden council has been on its guard against overt or conscious discrimination in its employment policies, and it is fitting that we should be one of the first authorities to implement not only the letter but also the spirit of the new Race Relations Act.’ Camden Council was around the same time being praised by the Equal Opportunities Commission for its ‘policy designed to promote equal opportunities for the men and women it employs’.12
Herman Ouseley in 2014
Lambeth’s Community Relations Council called for ‘a small Race Relations Unit by Lambeth Council within one of its departments’. The Unit ‘would provide the information necessary for the Council to develop its strategy to eliminate discrimination and disadvantage, thereby promoting racial equality’.13 In the event, Ted Knight’s Race Relations Unit had more powers that were originally proposed. As described by its first head Herman Ouseley, the Unit was made up of ‘a Principal Race Relations Adviser with a back-up team… other race advisers would be based in the Directorates of Social Services and Management Services alongside the existing adviser in Housing Services’.14
The Unit, and the Council leadership, saw themselves at odds with an entrenched management and workforce. Council leader Ted Knight saw a struggle against ‘the inertia of the bureaucracy’:
The establishment of the Race Relations Unit, for example, a very significant development, demonstrated, and still demonstrates, that whilst you can take all the policy decisions you like, it is a continuous battle against the bureaucracy to make a change.
For Knight, the struggle over the Race Relations Unit was a sign of a broader fight with the Council officers, whom he saw as ‘very conservative, and probably so politically, as well as just in general attitudes — so, it’s a fight’.15
Ted Knight’s time as leader of Lambeth Council was cut short when he was disbarred from office for failing to set a ‘rate’ — that is the local property tax from which councils then raised part of their income — after the Conservative Cabinet cut the central government subsidy to rein in local spending (discussed later). After Knight the radical policy was carried on by the new council leader Linda Bellos, but the authority was increasingly embattled in its conflict with central government.
Though Lambeth’s adventures seemed outlandish at the time, much of what they did became mainstream later on. One clear continuity was that the Lambeth Race Relations Unit was the model for another, at the Greater London Council.
In 1983 the Greater London Council launched its Code of Practice, ‘on advice from the Commission for Racial Equality’, and sent it to ‘all staff with managerial and supervisory responsibilities’ in a booklet called Towards Equal Opportunities. Others could pick up a copy from the new Equal Opportunities Unit, a part of the Personnel Department. To showcase the policy, the GLC started a new internal paper called Equals, ‘a new avenue for publicising developing opportunities and rights for all employees’, said John Carr, chair of the GLC Staff Committee. It would, he wrote in the first issue of Equals, make ‘a reality of the phrase “the GLC is an Equal Opportunities Employer”’.16 Equals was edited by Judith Hunt, who had been active on the left and published on women’s rights (she went on to be Chief Executive of Ealing Council). Though the Staff Committee chair was put up to announce the policy, Livingstone recalled that ‘here in the GLC, the staff association is deeply reactionary, whilst maintaining that it is apolitical’.17
Valerie Wise, Ken Livingstone, Charlie Ross, and John McDonnell, outside the GLC, 1981
The GLC was not only an innovator in race relations. Its equal opportunities policy covered sex discrimination as well as race discrimination. In 1981 the GLC voted to set up a women’s subcommittee, and a women’s unit, with a budget of £6.9 million (twice that of the Equal Opportunities Commission) and 18 staff. A series of open meetings gathered activists, many of whom were co-opted onto the Committee. The model of a women’s committee and women’s unit was taken up in Lewisham, Camden, Islington, Southwark, and Hackney.18 The equality unit set out the scale of the challenge, with the example of Sue Batten, ‘the GLC’s only female firefighter’ out of 6,706; more, the ‘GLC employs only one woman electrician and only one craftswoman among 294 engineering craftsmen’.19 On 10 June 1983 the Staff Committee held the GLC to the view that ‘it is just as much against the law to discriminate in favour of women and ethnic minorities as it is to discriminate against them’, and that, therefore, ‘quotas are unfair, unlawful and unhelpful’. In the absence of quotas, County Hall adopted targets, as a ‘yardstick for measuring the success of the equal opportunities policy’: ‘an agreed proportion of women and ethnic minorities which may realistically be achieved within a certain period of time is a specified area of work’. They went on to say that ‘the eventual aim is that the makeup of the workforce mirrors the population of the GLC’s catchment area as closely as possible’, thereby tying employment to representation.20
It was not that women did not work for the GLC, the newssheet explained, ‘GLC workers are fed and cleaned up after by an army of women: mums at home as well as at work’.21 The GLC adopted a far-sighted view of the sphere of domestic work, when Ken Livingstone said that he would aim ‘to treat childcare and other areas of housework as an economic sector’.22 That was rather different from the mainstream view on the left, which in adopting its own ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’ focused largely on industry, and on the workplace.23 In 1983 the GLC and the Inner London Education Authority announced that ‘it would be opening Day Nurseries at County Hall and the former Bellenden School’ for its own workers.24
The Greater London Council had quite a hill to climb. Its first survey found that ‘the proportion of ethnic minority and women employees stands at 9% and 20% respectively’. Worse, ‘75% of white males are at grade
MG10 (earning over £7500 per annum) compared with 40% of ethnic minorities and only 30% of women’. As it seemed to Livingstone’s team in 1983 ‘there is a clear pattern of occupational segregation which covers both women and ethnic minorities and ensures that they are over-represented in low paid areas and under-represented or completely absent from a broad range of senior positions’.25
The Town Hall equal opportunities programmes had definite limits. They were dependent on a rate support grant from central government that was not sympathetic to the Labour groups’ empire building, and trying to hold down spending anyway. Town hall workforces were already in post, and however sympathetic they were to change, would not be willing to lose their jobs over it. In a tight economic climate turnover was low, and councils found it much more difficult to restructure and turn over their workforces than private industry did. The rate at which new jobs could be created was slow. A survey in May 1986 found that only two councils, Hackney and Lambeth, even had a workforce that matched the local ethnic mix; and in any event, in all councils surveyed, black employees were concentrated in the lower grades.26 The Greater London Council claimed in 1985 that it had increased its black workforce from 7% to 11% of the total since 1981, and the proportion of women had risen to 21%. The Council tended to blame the workforce for the slow pace of change, saying that ‘“Newcomers” can be forced to deal with the worst excesses of racist and sexist behaviour from those who are threatened by a woman or a black person clearly capable of doing the same job as them’, and promised disciplinary codes to ‘protect them’.27 Even the success in the London Fire Brigade turned out to be oversold. The ‘30% increase’ in black recruits turned out to be an increase from 1.2% to 1.6% of the total. ‘There were fewer black firemen in London at the time of the abolition of the GLC than there had been under the old London County Council in 1948.’28 The County Hall nursery was turned into an aquarium, though it only ever catered for a small number of children.29