The Equal Opportunities Revolution

by James Heartfield

  Other than narrowing differentials, the main effect of the Equal Pay Act, has been a greater degree of systematization in pay structures: equal pay was a factor in the introduction of job evaluation in nine organizations.41

  The Equal Opportunities Commission paid special interest to the promotion of job evaluation schemes, and helped to draft guidelines for these, because ‘there is no provision in the Equal Pay Act for a woman to claim equal pay for work of equal value if a job evaluation scheme has not been carried out’.42

  Equal opportunities policies also helped employers to systematise their monitoring of their workers. Employees were often hostile to companies keeping personnel records in the post-war order. ‘Company spies’ were hated amongst shop-floor militants, and the records kept by the Economic League were the basis of a blacklist of many of them.43 When it was first brought in, ethnic monitoring alarmed many workers, some of whom told Nick Jewson and the researchers at Leicester University that ‘ethnic identity was a personal and private matter that was not of relevance to the public world of work’.44 When Islington Council introduced ethnic monitoring they felt they had to say that ‘while mindful of the understandable fears and anxieties of individual employees, the Council will attempt to introduce a manageable monitoring and recording system, which fundamentally safeguards the confidentiality of individuals at all times’.45 Employees’ scepticism about ethnic monitoring was not unfounded. The private company with the oldest ethnic monitoring policy was Ford UK, a policy they had adopted from their parent company in America which had long held records on the race of their employees, and in Britain first ‘monitored the ethnic composition of its hourly paid workforce in 1969’. Back then workers’ cards were marked ‘white’ or ‘coloured’: ‘when new employees entered the Company, ethnic origin was incorporated into their personnel records’. When Ford first started writing down the race of their workers they did not tell them, but ‘by using data in personnel records it was possible to obtain a detailed picture of the ethnic minority composition of the workforce in all parts of the Company’. Given that Ford was known for the racial hierarchy it introduced into the organisation of the production line, the ethnic monitoring was not really there to stop discrimination, but to help it. Later Ford used ethnic monitoring as a part of its ‘equal opportunities’ policy so that ‘computerised systems enabled the Company to identify the proportions of women and ethnic minority employees by plant, Department, grade, age and years of service’. Whether these were truly working in the interests of employees is debatable.46

  Irene Bruegel and Diane Perrons at the London School of Economics raised doubts over the way that market rationalisation and labour market flexibility were helping women. In particular they argued that after job evaluation, the introduction of performance-related pay might mean that ‘discretionary elements may be reintroduced into previously formal pay structures which could allow “gendered stereotyped imagery and evaluation to come into play”’. The evidence, though, was mixed. Some evaluations of performance-related pay did show gender bias. There were, though, counter examples: ‘Boots the Chemists found that an increasing proportion of women were obtaining management roles as a consequence of the introduction of individualised appraisal systems’. What was also clear was that pay differences between women were growing with these reforms of pay structures: ‘Although in some respects gender inequalities have narrowed there is also evidence of widening inequalities between women.’ When these schemes were introduced they were opposed by between one fifth and a quarter of workers, and many had to be abandoned.47

  Rationalisation of employment contracts and labour management associated with the introduction of equal opportunities policies may have adjusted the balance amongst the workforce, but most of all they helped managers and companies to get the most out of their employees.

  From the point that individual employers adopt an equal opportunities policy, they own and control the process. There are, without doubt, compromises and substantial reforms of past practices involved, but these do not lead to a loss of managerial authority over the workforce; on the contrary, they lead to an enhancement of that authority. Surveyed by the Institute of Personnel Management, more than two thirds of those employers who had adopted an equal opportunities policy thought it was a success.48 It is available to employees to challenge individual managers, and even long-standing managerial prerogatives, but only in an appeal to company policy, as enforced by senior management, and operated day-to-day by the Human Resources department. Though companies often adopted such policies with the intent of getting ahead of the issue, and to avoid being forced by the external authority of the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality, and the employment or industrial tribunal, there is always potential for the enforcement of equal opportunities policies to be taken out of their hands. Still, even then, the process only ever restored the lines of authority that rested on management prerogative. Equal opportunities policies had costs for managers, but they also belonged to companies, however much employees identified with, or invested hope in them.

  — SEVEN —

  The Policy and the Working Class

  Equal opportunities legislation was introduced in Britain around the time that the corporatist labour organisation was in crisis. The determination of employers and the government to limit union power — and a marked fall in union membership — in the 1980s coincides with the growth of equal opportunities policies at work.

  Unions supported the legislation for equal pay and against discrimination on grounds of sex and colour. As they did so, they also accepted a new framework of legislation on pay that they had resisted. All through the Sixties and Seventies, unions had resisted legal restraints on pay. They defended the right of unions to freely negotiate contracts with employers.

  The legislation that they had fought against was designed to limit pay awards by government rules. The laws on pay discrimination were different. They aimed to increase pay. Still, the movement towards government regulation was a novelty.

  ‘In 1961, the Trades Union Congress, traditionally devoted to voluntary methods of achieving change for its members, called on the Government to ratify the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 100 on equal pay’, noted two researchers at the Department of Employment. They saw that the TUC, ‘in doing this, recognized that as a last resort this might mean that legislation would have to be introduced to enforce equal pay.’1

  When the Equal Pay Act of 1970 was tightened up in 1985, the Financial Times’ labour correspondent John Lloyd noted that the Equal Pay (Amendment) Act ‘carries with it further large implications — for the unions’. The laws on sex discrimination, explained Lloyd, offered ‘a large number of workers redress through industrial tribunals (and ultimately the courts)’. Lloyd saw that the question that was troubling many trade unionists was ‘if the law can give workers what they want, will they want us?’ Lloyd looked back at the tradition that the unions had defended of ‘collective laissez faire’ — which is to say that governments did not override the agreements between employers and unions. As Lloyd saw it, two different forces were changing workplace relations: on the one hand there was a growing individualism, and a government withdrawal from the role of negotiator between capital and labour; but on the other hand there was, in the shape of the legislation on equal pay, a growing regulation of labour contracts: ‘British collective bargaining is bit by bit ceasing to be collective laissez faire’, wrote Lloyd.2

  Unions had, of course, supported the legislation on race equality and sex discrimination that ushered in firms’ equal opportunities policies. Still there were many points at which unions might clash with the Commissions for Racial Equality and Equal Opportunities. In 1979 the Trades Union Congress spoke out against the Equal Opportunities Commission’s ‘proposals to reduce the levels of protective legislation for women workers’:

  The effect of what the EOC proposes is that in many circumstances, employers would have a
free hand to decide the hours of employment of women. This is not a step towards the equality of women. It opens the door to their greater exploitation.

  Perhaps what provoked the TUC most was the fact that ‘the Commission makes no reference to the work of trade unions in preventing exploitation’.3 For, the Commission Baroness Lockwood explained,

  where there is a genuine difference in the points of view of the TUC and the Commission, as there has been in the matter of the reform of protective legislation, I am afraid we shall have to present our own distinctive point of view to the public without fear or favour, and let the public choose.4

  Given that the Commission was fending off allegations of interfering in management’s prerogatives at the time, the disagreement with the TUC was not such a problem. The Equal Opportunities Commission often positioned itself as somewhere between the unions on the one hand, and the employers on the other. The Commission’s claim that ‘there is no room for doubt that the momentum towards equality will be lost unless Government and both sides of industry take steps to see that it is maintained’ very much situated it as a ‘tripartite’ institution, which is indeed where its origins lie, though it would become a model of the kind of workplace regulation that displaced the old tripartite system later on.5 In its early days its investigations were often of industry agreements so that the judgments it made were often against both sides of the industry, employer and union, equally.

  In the early days of the Commission, Baroness Seear pointed to evidence that:

  Shopfloor and local trade union resistance to breaking down segregation is regarded by many employers in printing, chemical process and packaging and pharmaceutical production as a substantial barrier to progress.6

  The EOC News reported APEX general secretary Roy Grantham’s complaints that ‘complacency and lack of interest reigned supreme on the Trades Unions General Council’s attitude towards women’: ‘Only 5 per cent of the council’s seats were allocated for the 27 per cent of the movement’s members who were women and they had been “fobbed off for years.”’7

  Later the Equal Opportunities Commission would support the activism of women trade unionists, like Patricia Turner, Equal Rights Officer for the General and Municipal Workers Union. Turner wrote in Equal Opportunities News about the growing number of women who were joining unions, contrasted with their less active participation, adding that ‘many men still regard trade unionism as essentially men’s business, to which women are not expected to be committed’. She outlined a number of special measures, including courses and a women’s conference to encourage participation.8 Encouraged by the Equal Opportunities Commission, and knowing that they were recruiting more women than men, the Trades Union Congress published a ten-point charter to press its members to act in 1979. Five years later 40 unions had set up women’s or equality committees, and 25 had appointed equality officers. Some, like the General Municipal and Boiler Makers Union, had provisions for equality officers at branch level.9

  Trade unions took up the cause of race equality, too, and the Commission for Racial Equality was more enthusiastic towards them than the Equal Opportunities Commission. In 1980 the Trades Union Congress announced a ‘black equality charter’. The headline point was to ‘get equality of opportunity written into all national and local union agreements with employers’, which was one of the pressures that moved the advance towards equal opportunities from national legislation to the adoption of firm-wide equal opportunities policies. Interestingly, John Monks, for the TUC, highlighted the claim that ‘we are seeking not a legal approach but voluntary self-regulation in the tradition of British trade unionism’.10 The Commission for Racial Equality worked with a number of trade unions, like the NUJ, AUEW, ASTMS, Council of Civil Service Unions, Barclays Group Staff Union, CPSA, and TGWU. The Commission organised fringe meetings at the Trades Union Congress, worked with the TUC’s Race Relations Advisory Committee, and helped to develop the Black Workers Charter that was published in 1987.11 Bill Morris, the Transport and General Workers Union leader, who went on to become TUC president, was a member of the Commission for Racial Equality in the late 1970s.

  As part of ‘its training programme for lay persons and lawyers to present cases in industrial tribunals’, the Commission for Racial Equality ‘began training trade union officials’.12 Around the same time, the Equal Opportunities Commission also began training trade union officials to follow cases under the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts. ‘The majority of applications to Industrial Tribunals’, the Equal Opportunities Commission acknowledged, ‘were from groups of women supported by their unions’. So it was that in 1985, ‘a number of unions including NALGO and APEX asked the Commission to collaborate in the design of training programmes to enable their own officers to identify and pursue test claims’.13

  The two Commissions encouraged the equal opportunities cause in trade unions and they helped union officials and representatives to pursue complaints under the laws against employers. As they were doing so they were helping to reform the unions. Beatrix Campbell once called the unions ‘the Men’s movement’, arguing that they had become part of the ‘patriarchal system’. In her view industrial tribunals are to this day ‘congested with equal pay claims, the cause of which is those differentials and bonuses’ that macho trade unionism imposed in the 1970s. Later on, Campbell argues, the unions were reformed by the women’s movement to become altogether more woman-friendly institutions.14 The substantial change was that the unions had reoriented themselves to the new terrain of workplace relations. Instead of collective action, union officials today are more likely to represent their members’ individual claims in tribunals, and with the HR department, often on the basis of the equal opportunities policies that they had negotiated with the management. A more courtroom-style model of union work in committees and tribunals had replaced the earlier parliamentary style of rank-and-file mass meetings. The unions were playing their part in the new regime of equal opportunity workplace organisation.

  To drive home the reform of industrial relations that was being put in place, John Major’s Conservative government folded reforms asked for by the Equal Opportunities Commission into legislation that limited trade union power. The Equal Opportunities Commission was glad to note ‘a stated commitment to “equality proofing” of new legislation’.15 The 1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act got rid of the ‘length of service’ restrictions on maternity rights, so that ‘every woman who becomes pregnant will be able to take a minimum of 14 weeks’ maternity leave and will be fully protected against losing her job because of her pregnancy’. The Act also included ‘the confirmation of the EOC’s power to draw up a draft Code of Practice on the Equal Pay Act 1970’.

  For trade unions, though, the Act had definite downsides. Unions who wanted to take strike action would have to hold a postal ballot (bringing an end to the mass meeting vote on industrial action) and also to give advance notice to employers of any such action. The Act was, according to Labour peer Bill Wedderburn, the end of a campaign whereby unions were ‘regulated, harried, battered, fined and sequestrated, step by step by step, in Act after Act in pursuit of the aim of decollectivising the workplace’. ‘Is not the world of tripartism’, summarised Lord Skidelsky approvingly, ‘completely out of date’.16 Some reforms directly linked advances in equal opportunities with dismantling the older model of collective bargaining, such as ‘the right for individuals affected by discriminatory rule in collective agreements to ask an industrial tribunal to declare the rule null and void’.17 The Equal Opportunities Commission of course supported the Act, Baroness Writtle speaking in its favour, and its main provisions welcomed in the Annual Report as a positive step forward for women, as it was at the same time a reform of industrial relations. Under this new regime, workplace relations were both more individuated, and also more regulated.

  More recently the rules governing Employment Tribunals have changed to prioritise claims under discrimination legislation. As it st
ands, an employee can bring a case against his or her employer if they have been working there for two years. That threshold is lower if the claim is made on the grounds of sex or race discrimination (as well as a few other exceptions). More, an employee who is making a claim for unfair dismissal can be compensated, but only up to the sum of £76,574, or one year’s full pay, whichever is lower. There is no such limit on cases that are brought under the laws on sex or race discrimination. Understandably, employees and their representatives, often trade union officers, have worked out that they have more rights to pursue cases that can be understood as race or sex discrimination. A great many grievances people have against their employers do have some element of sex or race discrimination, and complainants are more likely to frame their complaints in that way if they can. The consequence is that in 2014 fully 55% of all cases were brought under sex discrimination law, a marked rise since just 2012, when the percentage was 38.18

  Though the Equal Opportunities Commission took to working with the trade unions, they were still ready to investigate cases where unions might be discriminating. In 1986 the Commission reported Diana Robbins’ investigation into widespread discrimination against women in British Rail, and the railway unions’ collaboration in it. Local managers who were in charge of recruitment, found Robbins, ‘were largely hostile to employing women’, and a wide range of ‘indirectly discriminatory recruitment criteria and processes were used including age bars, mobility requirements and word-of-mouth recruitment’. Damningly, Robbins ‘found the railway unions uninterested in equal opportunities’.19

  SOGAT ’82

  The most pointed investigation of a union that the Equal Opportunities Commission undertook, however, was that of SOGAT ’82, the printers’ union, between 1984 and 1986. The case against the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades was pretty clear cut. As the descendant of the centuries-old printers’ guilds, print unions had much more say over work than most unions do. For many years they had controlled access to their trade and jealously guarded the skilled craft against the introduction of new technologies that might undermine their power. Work was allocated through the union branch. The print unions had been and still were organised around a male monopoly over work, ‘the historical demarcation between “men’s work” and “women’s work”’. In SOGAT ’82 that was clear in the division between ‘the London Central Branch (the LCB) and the London Women’s Branch (the LWB; this branch later became known as the Greater London Branch)’: ‘The Commission found that… specific practices resulted in LWB members either remaining ignorant of or being denied access to the higher paid and higher status vacancies controlled by the LCB.’ One instance flagged up was that of