The municipal pioneers of equal opportunities policies were to see their project bogged down in controversy and in-fighting. As we explore in greater depth in Chapter Five, the reaction on the part of the government to the local authorities that pioneered these policies was harsh. And yet surprisingly the self-same equal opportunities policies that were reviled and mocked when they were first trialled by the local councils were widely taken up by all kinds of employers in the private sector.
The private sector
In October 1984 Barclays Bank appointed Tina Boyden, formerly a branch manager and manager of Barclays International, as Equal Opportunities manager at their London Head Office, ‘to ensure that the bank’s policy of treating all applicants equally regardless of racial group, sex or marital status, is effectively carried out’. The previous November, all Area Officers were sent the bank’s Code of Practice, and from 1 January 1985 all applicants were asked to record their ethnic origins using a six-category classification. Around the same time British Petroleum’s 29,500 UK employees were subject to a new Code of Practice. In March 1984 the Group Personnel Department was briefing groups of managers in personnel in a series of seminars as part of their Awareness Programme, with the chairman telling them ‘that for the policy to be effective there was a need for managers and staff… to be aware of what constitutes discrimination, and to be conscious that discrimination can be the result of attitudes as well as employment practices’. Also in 1984 the 10,900 employees of the Halifax Building Society came under its new equal opportunities policy, agreed with the Staff Association, and issued to all who worked for the company. Managers in recruitment were to be trained and the workforce monitored by ethnicity. Imperial Chemicals Industry’s 50,000 employees, too, were brought under a similar code, incorporating ‘the equal opportunity statement and an ethnic origin question on all application forms’. Other companies that adopted equal opportunities codes included Midland Bank (which had a published equal opportunities policy from 1977), Safeway Food Stores, W H Smiths, Smiths Industries, and many more.30
In September of 1985 the Confederation of British Industry held a conference at Centre Point in London on equality at work. The point of the conference was to inform members of the Confederation about the Equal Pay (Amendment) Regulations of 1983, which came into force in 1984 after a European Economic Community ruling. The new rule made the equal pay law more precise. For the most part the CBI treated the new rules as simply part of legislative ground on which members worked, and most of the papers circulated were on the technicalities of compliance, though the CBI was promoting its own draft code of conduct at the same time.31 There were some arch comments among accounts of cases brought that expressed a little cynicism. More forward-thinking employers, though, were proactive on women’s opportunities at work as they were on those of ethnic minorities. In October of 1986 employers and personnel managers were instrumental in setting up the organisation Equality Exchange — ‘an information network of organisations interested in promoting equal opportunities for women in employment’ that was formally launched on 1 January 1987. By the end of the year 269 organisations had joined.32 The companies that were actively working with the Equal Opportunities Commission to address inequality at work at that time included British Gas, the Halifax Building Society, and the Metropolitan Police. Also, Tate and Lyle were working with the Commission to address the problem of sex segregation in their workplaces, while Esso was getting advice on ‘a series of short awareness-raising seminars on race and gender issues’.33
In 1992 a group of researchers at Leicester University asked employers about their experiences and motivations for introducing equal opportunities policies for ethnic minorities (specifically about ethnic monitoring, but the reasoning is broader, covering all facets). The researchers ordered the different reasons that employers gave for adopting the policy.
In the first case, employers said that the equal opportunities policy was a case of justice and morality: ‘both personnel and line managers frequently emphasised that monitoring was the right and proper thing to do’. Also, ‘the good employer, it was sometimes suggested, was not merely driven by the threat of legal sanction but voluntarily responded to the climate of the times with respect to such matters’. Public-sector employers in particular put ‘an emphasis on the provision of public service and care for the community was seen to entail an active involvement in the provision of equal opportunities’.
Norwell Roberts was one of few black officers in the Metropolitan Police
On the other hand, equal opportunities policies were often ‘developed in response to a variety of external pressures such as Head Office demands; CRE investigations; political lobbying; anticipated legal risks’. Similarly, ‘it was commonly recognised that the possession of an equal opportunities policy and monitoring system could be an advantage in the event of complaints of discrimination or tribunal proceedings’. To some managers the policy would be a kind of legal protection, ‘to keep the buggers away from our door’. In 1987 the Commission for Racial Equality reported not only that ‘the number of individual complainants who came to us for assistance rose by a quarter’, but that ‘in the employment cases we took up the success rate doubled, and there was a similar increase in the number of cases settled on terms’. So too did the size of award rise considerably. To the Commission these changes pointed to ‘a growing confidence in bringing complaints as well as a greater awareness of the nature of the racial discrimination by industrial tribunals and the courts’.34
Earlier on legal enforcement was a strong motivation. In 1985 an Industrial Tribunal reprimanded British Telecom when they heard that it was ‘unable to point to any document setting out the ingredients of the policy and what practical measures it was thought appropriate to take’ towards equal opportunities. In April 1986 an industrial tribunal found that British Rail had not discriminated against an Asian applicant for a senior position, but all the same reprimanded BR for its lack of an equal opportunities training policy. The tribunal wrote to chairman Sir Robert Reid who agreed to make the change.35 As important as observing the law was to employers as a motive for bringing in equal opportunities policies, these legal norms were quite quickly internalised by those employers who adopted them as their own. As many of the managers interviewed by Nick Jewson and the researcher at Leicester University said, ‘the publication of the Codes of Practice by the CRE and the EOC had had a decisive influence on management thinking’.36
An argument of growing importance was that equal opportunities policies were, in any event, good for business. For the Leicester University researchers, the gain from equal opportunities policies had lots of sides to it. So ethnic monitoring was seen ‘as an aspect of the rational recruitment, use and management of labour was a key theme in the reasoning of managers’ who were interviewed by the Leicester University team. It was also the case that ‘equal opportunities policies… were seen to confer market advantages’. Many thought that equal opportunities policies would contribute to ‘a positive corporate image’.37
Attitudes to equal opportunities among employers were changing. By 1996 Confederation of British Industry Director General Adair Turner was saying ‘our goal as wealth creators must be to give individuals opportunities, prospects and participation in the economy’s success’. Like many, he thought that it made perfect sense that an equal opportunities policy was good for business:
There is sound commercial sense in lifting the barriers to equal opportunities to achieve an employment meritocracy: and there is no case for unjustified discrimination based on characteristics which bear no relation to an individual’s ability to do the job.
To Turner equal opportunities were good because they let business:
• Access a wider and higher skilled labour pool
• Gain a diverse workforce which reflects the composition of the wider community
• Achieve increased flexibility and competitiveness
• Eliminate unjustified and unlawf
ul discriminatory practices
• Increase morale at work and beyond
Turner’s speech was made into a booklet by the CBI, who commissioned the militant anarchist designer Clifford Harper to draw the cover, giving it the look of a left-wing pamphlet, titled A Winning Strategy — The Business Case For Equal Opportunities.38 Researcher and activist Cynthia Cockburn pointed out that ‘we are now seeing companies, whose managers would not so long ago have castigated [London local authorities] as “loony leftists”… announcing similar provisions’.39
Hearing the managers’ claim to be on the side of justice and the good naturally draws a lot of cynicism from a lot of people. The ‘business case for equal opportunities’ sounds to many like a contradiction in terms. It would be a mistake, though, to think that managers act in a vacuum. They respond to social pressures like other people. The hard thing to understand is what pressure employers were under that made them feel that they had to do good things.
The best way to understand the employers’ position is to look at the character of industrial relations in the period that the equal opportunities policies were taken on board, the Eighties and early Nineties. By all accounts this was a difficult time. Many managers made many harsh choices that hurt people’s living standards, working conditions, and security. Many of them downsized, contracted out, delayered, and laid off workers; many imposed new contracts with worse hours and conditions. Importantly, many employers junked the old bond that tied workers and managers together, the negotiated agreements with union representatives. These changes, they thought, were needed to restructure business to make it competitive. Some who were interviewed by the Institute of Personnel Management ‘were found to have been very unhappy with the previous accommodation to trade unions which their organisation had to make for one reason or another in the past’. In the survey, taken in 1984, managers were asked if their attitude to labour was more bullish: ‘61 per cent affirmed that it was, while a further 10 per cent said their approach had always been bullish.’ One personnel manager in a food-processing plant explained:
I think we’ve also been affected by the current atmosphere of imposing the right to manage… so we’ve made quite a few changes which you could say diminish the conditions of employment.
Another said ‘we (management) want total autonomy on this site’. The logic of the market seemed to demand that the corporate partnership of managers and employees should be broken up. The idea that we were all in it together, backing Britain, was put to one side; now everyone was in it for themselves. But in the chill wind of Thatcherite individualism, the gulf between managers and their employees was great. The workplace reforms had taken away many of the mediating links between workers and bosses. The 1984 survey also found that ‘some personnel respondents were concerned about “rubbing the unions’ noses too much into the ground”’.40
It was not just that there was antagonism in the relationship, but that the employees were strangers to their employers. More and more they became preoccupied with the problems of recruitment and retention and of employee loyalty to the firm. After years of breaking down the traditional ties between managers and employees, firms started to talk about their Corporate Social Responsibilities. One clue to Barclays’ motives for its equal opportunities code was that at the same time as the equal opportunities post was created, a ‘Social Responsibility Unit’ was set up under Colin Dyer, with responsibility for the bank’s ‘inner city and community improvement’.41 Barclays had a bad reputation in the early Eighties, boycotted by many students and black people for its policy of investment in South Africa. Later in the decade it was trying to repair that reputation.
The business case for equal opportunities has been criticised. But the important thing is that it is understood. The core claim of the business case for equal opportunities is that there is a community of interests between employer and employee. As one manager told researchers at the University of Leicester, equal opportunities policies were ‘in the interests of their own business and therefore in the interests of everyone who works there’.42 Both are served by the policy of equal opportunities at work. To understand why such policies have been adopted you only have to ask why it was that firms felt the need to assert such a community of interests. The reason was that they had gotten rid of the older idea of a community of interest, which was corporate or social democratic in character. Under the older idea of community, a deal between workers, who were seen largely as English and male, had been struck through workplace negotiation: ‘British jobs for British workers.’ In place of that older ideal, a newer claim, the claim to be an ‘equal opportunities employer’, was being made.
One employer whose reputation was seriously hurt by the way it managed its workplace relations was the Ford Motor Company (UK). As we have seen, Ford was right in the middle of the argument over equal pay for women; it also had a bad reputation for its race relations (see Chapter One) with black workers on the assembly line overseen by white managers, and kept away from the more skilled jobs in the tool shop.
Ford were, however, early adopters of equal opportunities policies. Their first outline race policy was adopted in 1970. When they talked to the researchers from Leicester University, Ford told them that ‘seminars on the cultural background of ethnic minority employees (including case studies), intended for managers and supervisors had been established in the 1970s’; then, ‘in 1982, a new course on avoiding unfair discrimination in selection interviewing had been started, designed for supervisors and managers responsible for recruitment and selection decisions’; and ‘in 1987 a training seminar was launched for more senior managers who were responsible for implementing the equal opportunities strategy’.43 Given the way that black workers at Ford told their own stories to the Race Today Collective (see Chapter One), you have to wonder what was being said in those earlier management seminars. And as we shall see, Ford’s later experience on the question of race relations at work was far from harmonious. On the other hand, the company did set up a National Working Party in 1986 that led to ‘a Joint Statement on Equal Opportunity’ issued by the company and all the trade unions in 1988. Copies of the Joint Statement ‘were circulated to all employees in the form of a pocket-sized laminated guide’. Then that same year the company ‘set up a small Equal Opportunities Department, directly responsible to the Executive Director of Personnel’, under an experienced and senior manager.44
Ford also made a big push to get black recruits, and to give them a fair chance in interview. At one of its sites, ‘to increase ethnic minority participation, the apprenticeship training school had put on a careers conference for youngsters, parents, teachers and careers officers in the work-force catchment area’. When they struggled to keep the new black recruits they were getting, Ford set out ‘to improve the pass rate of ethnic minority applicants by developing access courses’ in association with a College of Further Education, and offering bursaries to help.45
One reason that Ford was keen to improve its relations with the local community was that there ‘had been a substantial reduction in the size of the Company’s UK workforce’. Moreover, there had been intense conflict at the plant. In 1988 new working practices that broke down job demarcations in the name of ‘flexibility’ provoked a nationwide strike.46
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s employers were developing new ways of relating to their employees, and to the public. Though the municipal authorities that modelled the first equal opportunities policies seemed to be doing it for different reasons — political reasons — than the other private-sector employers, their motives were more similar than they appeared. In both cases, large employers were trying to remotivate their moral purpose, and in that, their relationship to their employees, first, and to their customers. The old order of corporatism, working through union agreements, was being dissolved by a new individualistic approach. Strange as it may seem at first, the growing importance of ‘equal opportunities at work’ was a part of that shift. Certainly ‘e
qual opportunities’ was a more attractive side to the drive to labour market liberalisation, and for many women and black people, the greater openness was a boon. What it did not do, though, was to bring about equality between employers and employed. Later we will look at the way the new equal opportunities revolution helped to reorder relations at work.
In the next chapter, though, we must look at the reaction that the policies provoked.
— FIVE —
Reactions
Looking back at the growing influence of equal opportunities policies in the 1980s, one might think that this was a markedly progressive or radical decade. Anyone who was there will tell you it was not. Massive changes were underway in society, but these were not obviously favourable to women or black people. The Conservative governments of the 1980s are known for their social conservatism.
Two headline messages from the Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher, set out the boundaries of the party’s attitudes on equal opportunities. The first was in an interview she gave to the TV show World in Action shortly before she was elected Prime Minister. There she said:
[I]f we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.1
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