The Equal Opportunities Revolution

by James Heartfield

  Companies confronted with staid and unimaginative leaders often hope to reorganise and lose the dead wood. When firms adopted equal opportunities policies in the 1980s and 1990s, they challenged the outlook of their older managers and employees. In the summer of 1992 the police service agreed to monitoring after a tribunal ruled that Senior Police Chief Alison Halford had been discriminated against when she was not short-listed for a post with the Merseyside Police Force. In 1999, after the public inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence, and the police failure to prosecute the perpetrators, Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon gave his support to the fast-tracking of minority officers in the senior officer training programme. Many of the early candidates, like Ali Dizaei and Tariq Ghaffur became the target of sustained campaigns of abuse and allegations of impropriety by long-standing officers. ‘Let me be unequivocal from the outset’, said the new Commissioner Sir John Stevens, ‘there is no place in the Metropolitan Police for racists’. Those who could not get used to the new conditions should ‘get out of the Met now’.21 A good job, too, you might well agree. Still, the fall-out from the Lawrence Inquiry and the discrimination hearings was a marked turnover of staff. In 2014 a Freedom of Information request showed that more than 800 police service employees had been investigated over racist, homophobic, and threatening comments on social media. Many were disciplined, but many more simply left before the cases could be considered. ‘More than 70 have retired, resigned or been sacked over the past five years.’22 The reform process accelerated staff turnover in the police forces across the United Kingdom. According to one report, ‘some 50% of officers faced with a misconduct hearing choose to resign’, and as the author makes clear, resignations ahead of hearings are thought of as advantageous both to the officers investigated, and to the police. Another report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission noted that investigations of race discrimination could end in resignations.23 In Parliament, questions were raised about the way that many officers seemed to have evaded disciplinary hearings in discrimination cases by taking early retirement.24 Many more, older officers heard the message that the force they had trained in had changed, and left, leaving the way for a new generation of career officers like Cressida Dick and Bernard Hogan-Howe.

  Herman Ouseley and Usha Prashar explained that Lambeth’s new Race Relations Unit would cut across traditional management structures. Race officers would ‘have direct access to their appropriate committee chairmen, and their reports would appear at respective committees unaltered, but with appropriate comments from chief officers, if necessary’. ‘These innovative reporting arrangements’, they added, ‘made the function and role of the Race Relations Unit quite unique’:

  Thus the advisers were given an independent role with access to power. The Unit also had access to the Leader of the Council to generate speedy intervention on any issues of great concern.25

  Council leader Ted Knight saw the senior council officers in post as a self-serving bureaucracy, and a barrier to change. The Race Relations Unit and the Race Officers were a lever to prise open the Council, and change it in the image of the Labour administration. The Race Officers were called ‘Race Tsars’ by a hostile press, though, suggestively, the model was widely adopted in government in the 2000s. Special officers to deal with social problems were created like the ‘Social Mobility Tsar’ (Alan Milburn), the ‘Respect Tsar’ (Louise Casey), and more recently a ‘High Street Tsar’ (Mary Portas). In management theory the goal that Tom Peters and Peter Drucker identified of innovation was given an added moral foundation with the equal opportunities revolution that was taking place in the town halls, and would soon migrate into private industry.

  In the way that the workplace was organised, the union had less authority, and the Human Resources department, more. Senior union representatives looked at in the Workplace Employment Relations Survey were three fifths male, whereas ‘around three quarters of HR managers and almost two thirds of personnel managers were women’. HR departments and HR managers were much more likely to be female.26

  All across the world of work, from Lambeth Council to Lever Brothers and the Metropolitan Police, older employees who had been recruited in different times and under different social mores either learned to change, or took early retirement. In the early 1990s black employees of the London Underground pushed hard for representation in senior grades. Since then the Tory London Mayor from 2008-16, Boris Johnson, gave out surprisingly generous payments for early retirement. The effect has been that there are many more black managers and drivers, while older white union members, many of whom were active in earlier labour disputes, are leaving — just as the Underground is closing ticket offices and arguing for a 24-hour service and driverless trains. ‘The lean, “streamlined”, “slimmed-down” firm has lost most of its hierarchical grades’, write Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, ‘consigning whole layers of hierarchy to unemployment’.27 With the way opened up, younger aspirant managers who identified with the changes would advance their careers by learning the new mantras. One woman, a manager in the civil service, told Cynthia Cockburn, that ‘we see ourselves as one of the agents of change, the “managers of tomorrow”’. On the other hand, ‘there is no room in this scenario for fetishized masculine careers’, according to Cockburn — echoing the Thatcherite slogan, ‘no more job for life’.28 Those who were promoted were more beholden to the newer style of management. As one recruiter in television explained to me, they were appointing more women as producers and assistant producers because they were more eager to prove themselves, while the men were more reluctant to put themselves out and prone to clock off at six. These small adjustments in the relative positions of men and women, and of white and black, were at the same time substantial adjustments in the position of employee and employer — in the latter’s favour, as managers gained greater authority over a diverse workforce — and got rid of a lot of older, male, and perhaps less motivated and more cynical hands.

  Socialising the workforce

  Brand strategists decided in the 1990s that the company’s ethos would drive the workforce. Brands and company catechisms were all the rage. Loyalty to the company brand, it was hoped, would bind employees to the company. Chuck Pettis said that workers should recite the corporate catechism, to remind them of their higher purpose:

  Employees should have the positioning statement and the associations posted at a visible spot near their telephones so that they can refer to them when communicating with any of the companies’ publics, including prospects, customers and suppliers.29

  When the supermarket Asda was in trouble in 1996, they raised emergency funds, selling shares to the workforce. Their strategy for re-branding was directed at the staff, as chairman Archie Norman insists: ‘central to the Asda proposition is straight talking’. For Asda employees that meant ‘living the legend’ — and 36,000 were made to buy shares.30 Company brands are important, and the hope that employers would identify with the success of the company is not irrational, but perhaps too naked an appeal to succeed. Another feature of business in the 1990s was the ‘mission statement’, which would put the company’s unique selling proposition into a grander and more benevolent-sounding frame. With a lot of scepticism towards ‘fat cat’ city traders and bankers, many companies took on the goals of ‘corporate social responsibility’, and not a few took on mentoring and other social work in wider society. Reports by committees under Adrian Cadbury (in 1992) and then under Sir Richard Greenbury for the CBI (1995) investigated the public perception that big business and chief executives in particular were dishonest and overpaid. British Petroleum, mindful of the criticisms of the carbon economy, went to the self-abnegating extreme of branding itself ‘Beyond Petroleum’, expressing a commitment to invest in alternative energy sources.

  Northern Rock mission statement, 2006

  The guilty secret behind a lot of the attempts to re-motivate the moral standing of business was that it was not just the wider public that did not trust bosses. In
2003 Mercer Human Resources Consulting found that ‘only four in 10 employees trusted their managements or thought their behaviour was consistent with company values’, while ‘fewer than half thought their company was well managed’. Worse, trust in management fell the longer people had been working there.31

  Before the words ‘mission statement’ had ever been used by a British company, thousands had adopted equal opportunities policies. The great advantage of the policies to managers was that it cast the company’s purpose in a positive light, enjoining workers to support the cause. Employers could demand acceptance of the equal opportunities policy.

  When Lambeth Council published its equal opportunities policy in a Code of Practice in March 1981, it ‘became the responsibility of all council employees’, and ‘failure to operate or comply with the Equal Opportunities Policy’ was made punishable as a gross misconduct. In recruitment, ‘the equal rights dimension of service provision should be included in the personnel specification’, with the clause: ‘It is essential that the post-holder exhibits a clear understanding of the social background and problems of Lambeth’s community and in particular of the disadvantaged black, female and disabled groups.’ In the new code of conduct, ‘failure to do so should be considered as an excluding factor’. In interview, ‘a candidate’s expressed opposition to the operation of the Equal Opportunities Policy should represent sufficient grounds for non-selection’. On appointment, staff were to sign a declaration:

  I have read and understood the Council’s Equal Opportunities Policy, and acknowledge that the offer of employment is made subject to my agreement to pursue actively that policy during the course of my employment and to undergo any training associated with this.32

  Justified by the moral exigency of ‘equal opportunities’, the employer, Lambeth Council, was demanding a remarkable degree of loyalty. They were saying that not only should employees follow company policy, but that they should believe in it, too. Some people were sacked for acting against the equal opportunities policy. More took the lesson to heart that the values of the employer had changed, and changed their own behaviour, and perhaps their beliefs, accordingly. Whether a belief that the equal opportunities policy was tokenistic, or that the ‘business case for equal opportunities’ was doubtful, would have proved an ‘excluding factor’ we do not know.

  In her book The Managed Heart, University of California sociologist Airlie Russell Hochschild explains how employers demand ‘emotional labour’ from ‘nannies, daycare workers, eldercare workers, nurses, teachers, therapists, bill collectors, policemen, workers in call centers’.33 At the Prêt À Manger sandwich chain, the Daily Mail reports:

  bizarre ‘emotional labour’ rules mean employees of the popular sandwich chain are expected to be ‘charming’, to ‘have presence’, and to ‘care about other people’s happiness’, and should never be ‘moody’, or ‘just here for the money’.

  What is more, ‘mystery shoppers visit branches every week to ensure all staff are displaying “Prêt perfect” behaviour.’34

  What seems exploitative in retail, emotional engagement with management policy, appears not to be so when the outcome is generally understood to be a social good; the demand that employees believe in the equal opportunities policy does not seem to cross a line, where the goal is social justice rather than sales.

  Even though the explicit outcome was a social good, employees’ active adoption of the equal opportunities policy had advantages for employers. By upholding the policy, and expecting employees to do the same, managers were socialising their workforce in shared norms. It was, after all, the company’s equal opportunities policy that the workforce was expected to observe. Policies were generally negotiated with unions, but once adopted were enforced by management — by HR in a larger company. The disciplinary process was in the hands of the management, which would lodge the original complaint, prepare the charges, and organise the initial hearings, under the terms of the policy. At one North London school a teaching assistant was being managed for poor attendance, and let slip in an informal hearing that she had become depressed when her daughter started dating a Turkish man. The school promptly dropped the investigation of her work, and sacked her instead for discrimination, though there was no evidence that she had discriminated against any schoolchild or teacher. Her union representative sympathised with her plight, but agreed with the enforcement of the policy. The disciplinary process enhanced the authority of the employers over the employees.

  To reinforce the common norms of the equal opportunities policy, employers can train staff in procedures laid down in the policy, and even in the motivation and attitudes behind the policy. From 1985 the Equal Opportunities Commission offered companies training in the application of the code of conduct it published that year. The Commission took note of ‘the Awareness Training Programme launched by Esso UK Ltd’, which, they explained, ‘is an important initiative, structured around a series of short awareness-raising seminars on race and gender issues’. In 1986 the Ford Motor Co Ltd gave training to managers involved in interviewing and the same year Woolworths started a training programme with the advice of the Commission for Racial Equality.35

  At the Greater London Council, in April 1983, ‘the first 4-day course for GLC employees on multicultural ways of working’ was held. The courses were run by Linda King, a black community worker and trainer. ‘It made me think in ways I’d never thought before’, said one participant: ‘I’ll never tell a black person in future they’re being “too sensitive” about racism.’ Another taking part said that she had thought of herself as a ‘non-racist’ before the course, but ‘now I describe myself as an “anti-racist” — actively opposed to racism’.36

  Training on equality policies suited companies who were thereby taking control of an issue that had caused them difficulties in the past. Training programmes generally have a tendency to reinforce company authority. They are a way of communicating with employees that is didactic, not negotiated. The Institute of Personnel Management’s 1986 survey found that managers were less interested in negotiation, more interested in ‘information-giving exercises such as briefing groups’, because ‘such exercises strengthen the ‘line’ authority of management’: ‘The majority of personnel managers are enthusiastic advocates of this type of communication exercise — they are devotees of employee involvement rather than industrial democracy.’37

  Staff training fits well into the ideal of top-down communication; training in equal opportunities has the advantage that the content of the training is egalitarian while the process gone through would tend to reinforce the authority of the trainer, and therefore the employer. The Transport and General Workers’ Union branch chair at Ford’s Dagenham plant, Jim Brinklow, remembered one confidence-building exercise: ‘the garage steward was there with a magazine and a pair of scissors and he was cutting out pictures’. Brinklow demanded ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ and then threatened ‘I am going back to the plant, and I’m going to tell your members what you’re doing’: ‘Pack it up and get a bit of dignity inside you.’ As Brinklow saw it, the exercise was demeaning for a workplace representative, and also a means of covering up the real conflict between the employers and the workforce.38

  The Commission for Racial Equality thought that training in race would have the advantage of ‘increasing awareness of racism and prejudice, both at an individual and an institutional level’. There were two approaches, they thought: ‘race-related training is the subject of a debate about whether the focus should be on attitudes or behaviour’. The Commission was sympathetic to courses developed by Judy Katz in the United States based on behavioural therapy, which they said would:

  • Facilitate the process whereby whites ‘own’ the problem of racism, i.e. acknowledge and accept responsibility for it

  • Facilitate acceptance by whites of their individual role in sustaining or removing racism

  Reluctant to commit to the idea that employers could tell their workers what to
think, the Commission concluded that ‘there can be little quarrel with the view that employers have the right to expect a certain code of conduct from their staff, consistent with the law and fair employment practice’.39 Of course, no manager wanted to engage in a quarrel over equal opportunities, but rather to dictate how such relations would be carried on at work. Equal opportunities training would help to socialise employees in the kind of conduct they could expect from staff.

  Rationalisation of labour

  Early on, the laws on sex discrimination were used to modernise labour contracts and personnel management. When Barbara Castle looked at equal pay legislation, she was advised by a civil servant John Locke (he went on to be the first Director of the Health and Safety Executive). Locke, who ‘did an excellent job on the Bill’, argued ‘that “equal value” should be linked to job evaluation schemes and firms’ pay structures’.40 A survey on the impact of equal pay legislation noted that: