Sheila Cohen interviewed activists in the Transport and General Workers Union branch for the Paint, Trim, and Assembly plant at Dagenham. One, Roger Dillon, won a discrimination case against Ford for the effective racial segregation of the plant (between its north and south estates). He was largely unimpressed by the Commission for Racial Equality, though: ‘the CRE was in bed with the Ford Motor Company — they were wined and dined’. Dillon went on to say that ‘the company spent millions on Equal Opportunities — but they never changed… they were just ticking the box… The policy documents are used as a cover.’ In 2003 Ford UK Ltd ‘came fourth in Race for Opportunity’s (RfO’s) diversity benchmarking survey of private companies’ — the year after it closed car production at Dagenham.41
In the case of the SOGAT ’82 investigation and the equal opportunities policy at Ford Dagenham, paper equal opportunities policies were doing nothing for industrial workers under attack. If anything, the new way of talking about workplace relations cast these employers as out-of-date dinosaurs, who would have to make way for change. It was not that the policies were responsible for the changes that were taking place. But they did add to a perception by managers, and by union leaders, that collective action and workplace militancy was outdated, or ‘macho’. The top-down equal opportunities policies were a part of the way that management, government, and union leaders were reordering life at work, which was at once more individuated, but also more regulated.
The economic cycle and the working class
The British economy often seems to go through a cycle of strong growth, followed by a recession or even a crash, slowly recovering again. The metaphor of the economic cycle, though, covers up a marked change in the way that labour was and is rewarded. When organised labour was strong workers got back around 58% of what they made, giving up the rest to the employers’ profits. From 1983 workers’ share of output fell back to under half, while the employers’ share rose accordingly. The cycle had a big impact on employment and the make-up of the workforce, but the reforms of the 1980s decisively shifted the share of income in favour of capital. One way that re-division of the spoils was hidden from view was that overall output grew, so that while workers’ share was less, the absolute amount they got was more.
In the long trend, Britain’s economic output grew from £874 billion to £1.8 trillion between 1971 and 2014. That growth was punctuated by recessions in 1974-75, 1980-82, 1991, and 2009. Recessions often led to people being put out of work — though the long trend is for a growth in employment from 25 to 30 million.
After the spring of 1975, 150,000 jobs were lost from a total just short of 25 million, and not recovered until 1979. This recovery was brief, and between 1980 and 1983 the numbers in work fell from 25,225,000 to 23,630,000 — a loss of 1.5 million jobs. Not until 1987 did employment return to the 1980 level.
Source: ONS
As we have seen, it was feared that recessions would hurt the advances that women had enjoyed in periods of economic growth.
The impact of the recessions on the numbers of men and women in work were different. Male employment fell from 1973 to 1978 by half a million to 15.16 million. Over the same period women’s employment grew by half a million to 9.6 million.
Between 1980 and 1983 women’s employment fell from 10 million by 300,000. In July 1980 the Equal Opportunities Commission warned a House of Lords Committee that unemployment was rising faster for women than men. A more likely explanation was ‘the increased tendency of women to register as unemployed as compared with previous years’. Men’s employment started to fall the year before, in 1979, and 1.3 million jobs were lost to men up to the spring of 1983, when the numbers in work fell below 14 million. Not until 1989 did male employment return to its 1979 peak, whereas women’s jobs were back at 10 million in 1984 and continued to climb to more than 11.75 million in 1990.42 The Equal Opportunities Commission highlighted the demand for labour to make the case for more nursery provision, writing that ‘the dip in the number of school leavers combined with the growing skill shortages requires a major national effort to get the work family balance right and make it easier for working parents to be effective at work and at home’.43
Between 1991 and 1994 overall employment fell again, from 26,871,000 to 25,303,000, more than 1.5 million jobs lost. Not until 1997 were those jobs recovered, and the numbers in work carried on climbing until 2009. In 2009 half a million jobs were lost, though these were recovered in three years. In the recession of 1991 around 300,000 women employees’ jobs were lost while more than a million men’s jobs were lost. In 2012 men made up 53% of all those in work — around two thirds of all women of working age work, while three quarters of all men of working age work. One important qualification is that many more women work part-time — about three sevenths of the total, while only one eighth of men work part-time.
It is worth trying to unpick what has happened. The metaphor of the ‘economic cycle’ is not as good as it seems.44 The idea of the cycle is that things go up and down and that we get back to the point that we were in before. The metaphor of the cycle is a way of reconciling change with the prejudice that things do not change.
The theory of the economic cycle, as far as the employment of women and ethnic minorities goes, suggested that they would be a ‘reserve army of labour’ — put to work in flush times, and then laid off again when times were leaner. Marian Ramelson first suggested that this might not quite be what was happening with women in the labour market, when she anticipated that ‘even if the economy goes into a slump or crisis the evidence is that the relative role of women at work does not decline’.45 What was more, the way that the employers and the government had dealt with organised labour in the 1980s had changed the way that the labour market worked. It was true that there had been a contraction in employment in 1980 and another followed in 1990. But overall the tendency was towards an expansion of the numbers in work. From 1995 onwards the numbers in work grew, not just in Britain, but across the developed world, at a higher rate than the population. The International Monetary Fund called it ‘job-rich growth’, noting that it was a reversal of the preceding period of capital-intensive growth that followed the Second World War, and ran up to the late Seventies. Most recently, the recovery from the 2008 recession saw a sharper increase in both full-time and part-time employment for women, and an increase in part-time jobs for men, but almost no new full-time work for men, according to the Resolution Foundation’s 2015 survey.
A surprising feature of the ‘job-rich growth’ from the mid-Nineties was that it did not provoke wage inflation, as the economists expected. The reason was that something had changed in the labour market. The organisational and ideological defeats suffered by the labour movement meant that even when the recovery came, they were in no position to take advantage of it. Employment gains, concluded the EC’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, reflect ‘the effects of several years of wage moderation’.46 With wages constrained, it was cheaper for employers to expand their businesses by taking on new workers, than by investing in new machinery. The United States and Holland expanded their workforces by inward migration; Germany, by assimilating East Germany into its modern economy; Britain did allow more migrants to come in the 2000s, but largely expanded its workforce by putting more women to work.
The process of recruiting women into the workplace was not planned exactly. Indeed, many senior government figures were saying that the opposite should be happening. The Equal Opportunities Commission said it was ‘suggested in an increasing number of places that one solution to the problem of unemployment is for women to return to the traditional role in the kitchen’.47 But that was not what happened. The change in the gender make-up of the workforce went the other way, as the economy was restructured. Older industries were downsized or broken up. More jobs were created in the service sector. The older jobs were often in unionised firms, the newer jobs more often not; the older jobs were more highly paid, the newer jobs were often
not; the older jobs were full-time; many of the newer jobs were part-time, or had irregular hours; the older jobs were permanent, but more of the newer were on temporary contracts. More of the newer jobs went to women, less to men. Men who were used to higher wages and better conditions had to think twice about taking these service-sector jobs on, while they might be a step up for women used to earning less; older men were often demoralised by the collapse of traditional industries. The President of the Society for Population Studies, David Endersley, thought that ‘in traditional areas like the North East unemployment has forced changes in family work patterns and whereas men are losing jobs by their thousands, women are finding more work’. ‘There’s a very sharp increase in the number of households where the women’s earnings are predominant and the larger part of the household income,’ he added.48 Where there was a deliberate choice to employ more women, and also ethnic minorities, was in the adoption of equal opportunities policies by employers.
The position of women relative to men improved, but men still had more jobs than women. It does not follow that women’s position improved absolutely. It changed. Some things were better. Some were less so. One decisively positive change was that many more women at least had the chance of economic independence. Nearly half of all driving licenses issued are to women, and nearly 4 million women live alone. Economic dependence on men put many women in a vulnerable position in the 1960s, whereas today the possibilities of leaving a difficult relationship are a great deal easier, and since 1991 rates of domestic violence have fallen markedly.
Whether we think women were better off over all depends on what you think of employment – certainly they were working more. Looking at what had happened to men and women in relation to their employers, the picture is different.
Schematically you might say that in 1970 15 million men and 9 million women made goods and services to the value of £830 billion (in 2016 pounds). So perhaps 6 million women worked full-time raising children and keeping home, while another 3 million did that for part of the time, while working for the other part.
By 2015 16.5 million men and 14.5 million women made goods to the value of £1.8 trillion. Six million of the women were working part-time, so were most likely raising children or keeping house in the rest of the time. Two million of the men were also working part-time. Perhaps another 2 million women were raising children full-time.
The workforce increased by 5 million, which means 5 million more pay packets — an increase mostly down to the increase in women working, and largely possible because of a fall in the time spent on housework (which we consider in the next chapter). Double-income households were better off in cash, but time-poor.
If we look at the share of the billions of pounds of output that fell to the workforce as pay we see that as we have moved in the direction of gender equality at work, employers did better relative to employees (see graph above). Between 1948 and 1979 employees’ compensation — wages — made up 58%, on average; from 1983 to now, workers’ share of output dropped to 49%. Women improved their position relative to men, but employers did best of all. They spent £888 billion setting 30 million people to work to make goods to the value of £1.8 trillion, earning £930 billion for themselves. In 1961 they spent (the equivalent of) £342 billion to put 25 million people to work, to make goods to the value of £583 billion earning just £241 billion for themselves. Those 5 million new workers were making a fortune for British business.
Equal opportunities policies had costs. It would cost to pay equal wages. Beatrix Campbell estimated that ‘if women in the banking system in Britain were paid the same wage as men for work of equal value the banks would have to find an estimated £17 billion to cover the cost’.49 As it happened the costs were not so great since the women were often taken on at lower grades and less pay, while at the same time the men’s wages were being held down. The horizon of equal pay approaches not just on the basis of raising women’s wages, but also on the basis of holding down men’s.
The idea of the ‘family wage’, according to many of the feminist critics of the old order, was archaic — and they were right. The idea that men were breadwinners and women’s earnings were just ‘pin-money’ reinforced the authority of husbands over wives. Unfortunately, the end of the family wage was really just a limit on wages that meant that both partners had to work just to earn enough to live on, and women’s hours were annexed to the office, shop, or factory, putting great strain on families that became work-rich and time-poor.50
Manchester council workers demonstrate against the threat to deport George Roucou, 1987
Government also spent more on nursery places. But overall the business case for equal opportunities looks pretty solid.
The relation of black workers to the economic cycle was different. As we have seen, the two largest non-white minorities in the UK in the 1970s, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians, were both hit disproportionately hard by the recessions of the 1970s and the early ’80s. Overrepresented in industry, black and Asian workers suffered as industry was downsized. They were hurt, too, by their concentration/ segregation into certain kinds of factory work (like textiles in West Yorkshire or the furniture trade in Tottenham) that were declining. Official oversight on the part of police and immigration services made black workers less secure and opened them to discrimination by employers and workmates alike. The demand that black workers show their passports to employers fixed the idea that they were second-class workers as they were second-class citizens. Most importantly of all immigration from the black commonwealth was slowed by the 1981 Immigration Act and the many subsequent acts to ‘close loopholes’. The impact on work and pay was clear: ‘The ethnic wage gap increased from 7.3 in the 1970s to 12 per cent in the 1980s, whilst the unemployment differential increased from 2.6 percentage points to 10.9 percentage points.’51
In the 1980s, the non-white share of the population of Britain rose more slowly, through secondary migration (wives and families joining men who had moved in the Seventies and Sixties), or through natural growth. The recession at the start of the 1990s did not see much of a difference in the ethnic pay gap. Black earnings were 11% lower than whites’, while unemployment was 9.8% higher.52 There were some differences emerging though. Indians were doing better relative to Afro-Caribbeans and Pakistanis.
From the mid-1990s a second wave of migration came to Britain. Political conflict and dislocation in a number of developing countries led to a resurgence of movement to Britain by asylum-seekers. Between 2000 and 2010 around 7000 Somalis were granted British citizenship every year, and the 2011 census identified 101,370 Somali-born residents in England and Wales. Other African migrants came as asylum seekers from Algeria in the early ’00s, from the Congo and from Zimbabwe (in 2003 the production line at Cowley, where a mostly white workforce had been employed 20 years earlier, had a team of Zimbabweans assembling cars for BMW, under a Mozambican supervisor). There were 201,184 Nigerian-born and 95,666 Ghanaian-born people living in in Britain in 2011. One important shift is that there are now more ethnic Africans than Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. Another important source of inward migration was from Poland, the Polish population of Britain doubling to reach 1.1 million between 2001 and 2011.
The way migrant labour was curbed and then encouraged has led many to see race as tied closely to the economic cycle. Some have argued a direct relation between the economic cycle and the liberality or otherwise of the immigration law. On this view when the economy is expanding the tap is opened to recruit more migrants to work in British industry — as it was in 1948 when the economy was expanding post-war. Later, when growth faltered and employment prospects were poor, immigration was restricted.
This view of immigration law as a response to labour needs seems compelling. But a closer reading of the record of legislators’ decision-making shows that far more ideological concerns about national identity, the loyalty of indigenous white populations, and fears over international standing all played a part — and in particular the
raft of anti-immigrant measures passed in the 1980s were without much practical rationale, but rather expressions of a fear of loss of national identity, and an assertion of control on the part of the elite.53
Towards the end of the 1980s the punitive attitude of the authorities towards black people was mitigated by a growing official recognition of discrimination. Where Lord Scarman’s report into the Brixton riots in 1981 fell on stony ground, the police started monitoring racially motivated attacks around 1989, and these were criminalised in 1998, shortly before Sir William Macpherson’s report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence put ‘institutional discrimination’ into the public eye.54 The official outlook on race was changing, holding up a good ideal of the loyal black Briton, contrasted with the illegal migrant. A Conservative election poster in 1983 had a picture of a smartly-dressed Afro-Caribbean man, with the slogan, ‘Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British.’ The adoption of equal opportunities policies is a part of that transition in attitudes to race. Settled and accepted ethnic communities have seen their positions improved. Those who are more recent arrivals, or are Muslim, have done less well. So Indians’ earnings are not less than those of their white counterparts, and Afro-Caribbeans’ only very slightly, whereas Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Africans earn around four fifths of the white earnings.
One way of looking at the working class has been the model of the ‘segmented labour market’. Charles Leadbeater saw a workforce ‘radically divided’ between a core of permanent workers, skilled at its centre, along with unskilled; around them he saw a peripheral workforce that is in temporary or part-time work; then there are the recently unemployed, and then a layer of long-term unemployed. It was ‘a strategy to legitimise a society where roughly two thirds have done, and will continue to do, quite well while the other third languish in unemployment or perpetual insecurity’.55 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello highlight these changes as part of the ‘New Spirit of Capitalism’:
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 18