Casualization has led to a segmentation of the wage-earning class and a fragmentation of the labour market, with the formation of a dual market: on one side, a stable, qualified workforce, enjoying a relatively high wage level and invariably unionised in large firms; on the other, an unstable, minimally qualified, underpaid and weakly protected labour force in small firms, dispensing subsidiary services.56
The segmented labour market is clearly an important way to understand inequality between sexes and races. Gill Kirton and Anne-Marie Greene look at the idea of dual labour markets where jobs in the primary sector are better paid, full-time, with better promotion prospects and more job security: ‘the primary labour market holds mainly “male” and “white” jobs, and the secondary sector “female”, “older worker” and “ethnic” jobs’.57 This is a similar model to that of the ‘reserve army of labour’, only fuller perhaps. As Kirton and Greene state, the model is not perfect, and does not explain the advance of women’s status at work. The model has explanatory power, but its weakness is that it tends to fix in time a snapshot of what is in fact a changing social and economic landscape. So, for example, many skilled industrial workers of the 1970s, like car or print workers, who would have certainly been reckoned among the core workforce, quickly discovered that they were no longer needed and were pushed out into the ranks of the unemployed. Moreover, the ideal of the ‘job for life’ was rarely met: some at the Cowley car plant in Oxford were laid off and then taken on again six or seven times, as the market rose and fell, and the plant changed hands from Pressed Steel, to Morris Motors, and then British Leyland. For our purposes here, the problem with the market segmentation model is that it tends to minimise the real changes that have taken place, and reinforce the idea that things are pretty much as they have always been.
Equal opportunity downsizing
In the early ’00s British Airways began to lose customers, stalling a planned expansion. The company employed 57,000 people, four fifths in the UK. Needing to find cost cuts of £650 million over two years, BA planned to cut 13,000 jobs. Another company, at another time, might well have used the principle ‘last in, first out’, meaning that those with the shorter length of service would go first. Such informal agreements often discriminate against black people, and against women, as they tend to have shorter job tenure. British Airways had a workforce that was ‘very diverse, with a high proportion of women and different cultures, religions, races, ages and abilities’ — though that was less true of its management.58
British Airways was self-conscious about the need to avoid what they called a ‘knee-jerk’ response to cost-cutting that would cause problems. They were also very committed to equal opportunities and ‘diversity management’, and had been for many years. Not only did BA avoid the ‘last in, first out’ approach, but they also were wary of trying to meet the problem through voluntary redundancies, fearing that this would jeopardise the work that they had put into recruiting a diverse workforce. They were conscious, too, that it is easier to address equal opportunities ‘in the context of a company that is growing’, but that ‘downsizing makes it more difficult to make progress on the representation issues’. According to one manager: ‘we wanted to check we had not got rid of disproportionately more women, or more disabled, or people with different ethnic backgrounds’. Overall, the job losses were borne equitably between men and women, and between black and white — 17,395 women were laid off, and 24,102 men; or, looked at in terms of race, 31,798 white people, and 4,679 black and Asian people lost their jobs.59
British Airways’ progressive approach to diversity did not save the 37,000 jobs, but it did make sure that the losses were evenly shared. Managers took pride in their approach. But it was little comfort to the workforce. Union leader Roger Lyons said that ‘this is a devastating body blow to staff, who have acted impeccably in responding to the needs of the company to safeguard jobs over recent months’. But framing the losses as ‘equal opportunity’ job cuts caused union leaders some difficulty framing their opposition. ‘We will not be rushing to the barricades, but rushing to the negotiating table’, said TGWU leader Bill Morris: ‘On the basis of no compulsory redundancies and no attacks on our members’ terms and conditions, we will help to achieve a managed reduction.’
The unions’ commitment to British Airways’ ‘managed reduction’ denied workers an avenue for opposing the losses. Pointedly, a number of peripheral disputes flared up over seemingly unconnected changes, which were nonetheless a knock-on effect of the job losses, managed or not. In the summer of 2003, 2,500 check-in workers struck over the bringing in of a new computerised time-recording system, which they feared would lead to greater flexibilisation (read: irregular shifts). The check-in workers were mostly women, many of whom had taken on part-time work to meet domestic tasks, and were particularly angry about the disruption the system threatened.
In 2005 Gate Gourmet, a catering company at Heathrow that supplied British Airways’ meals, announced that it would sack 670 of its workforce, many of whom were Sikh women living in nearby Southall. A bitter strike followed that highlighted the oppressive working conditions of the South Asian workforce. In their eagerness to bring in equitable cost-cutting, British Airways had forgotten that it depended on less enlightened management amongst its contracted-out suppliers.
British Airways’ equal opportunity job cuts were a success for the company, but not really for the workforce. In years gone by an employer might well have leant on the racist and sexist thinking of the day to create a moral justification for the kind of cutbacks that they were making. But in 2002-03 British Airways sought to dress up their job-cutting exercise in rather different clothes. Opening up a discussion about the right way to lose jobs, they made it clear that the question of whether jobs would go was not on the table. These were equal opportunity redundancies, but they hurt, all the same.
A new working class
Looking at the impact of the 1980s overall we can say that the working class has been unmade and remade. As left-wing commentator Richard Seymour says, it is ‘not your grandfather’s working class’. In 2013, one tenth of the labour force was made up of black and Asian people,60 and 46% were women. The recruitment of these additional workers has greatly enlarged the labour force. All told, these are profound changes.
As profound are the qualitative changes in the way the class of employees are organised. Trade union membership in Britain declined as the numbers in work have — over the long trend — increased. Union membership fell from its highest point of 13.2 million in 1979 to just over 7 million in 2013, from one half to one quarter of the workforce. The nature of union membership has been turned right around. Unionisation is most common where employers favour it. Most pay awards today are imposed, not negotiated. Unions act more often as advocates on behalf of individual members than they do as representatives of a collective will.
Running alongside those changes has been the growing acceptance of equal opportunities at work. The greater number of women and black people in the workforce has come as organised labour has had less influence. Equal opportunities policies have been extended just as the organisation of employment is less collective, and workplace negotiation has given way to a quasi-juridical relationship between employer and employee.
The marginalisation of the trade union movement is more than a sociological question. It says something about the existence of the working class as a class. In the 1980s, the ideology of socialism as a class outlook was effectively defeated, in the electoral and the industrial arenas. That outlook was core to working-class self-identity. Today some 60% of the population think of themselves as ‘working-class’.61 But today the identification does not mean identification with the labour movement, and is not allied to any social project. An appeal to ‘working families’ is a part of the rhetoric of all major parties, whether of the left or the right.
The greatest material consequence of the remaking of the labour force is the great increase in social inequa
lity, as wages have failed to keep pace with the growth in output. In companies that are badged as ‘equal opportunities employers’, working people have seen their share of the nation’s wealth fall.
— EIGHT —
Sources of Discrimination Outside the Workplace
The movement in the direction of parity in pay, for women and minorities, has been painfully slow, and the goal is still not won. Reforms in the law, and reforms in company policy, have over the last 20 years levelled the playing field, but inequality persists. Activists, policy makers, and scholars have turned their focus to the discrimination that takes place outside the workplace, in wider society, as the anchor which makes equality at work so elusive.
Critics have pointed to the limitations of civil freedom outside or beyond civil society, limitations which make the freedoms within civil society into a mask for unfreedom. Carole Pateman explains that modern society is divided between two spheres, public and private, so that ‘the private sphere is typically presupposed as a necessary, natural foundation for civil, i.e., public life’ (‘but treated as irrelevant to the concerns of political theorists and political activists’, she points out). At the same time, she says, there is ‘the subjection of women within the private sphere’.1 Catharine Mackinnon makes a similar point when she says that ‘Women are oppressed socially, prior to law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts’, adding that ‘the negative state’ — that is a liberal, hands-off state — ‘cannot address their situation’.2
Usha Prashar, Daniel Silverstone, and Herman Ouseley make a comparable argument when they say that ‘the view “treat them all the same” is quite discriminatory in its effects on different racial and cultural groups’. As they see it, ‘the notion of assumed equal opportunity for all has contributed greatly to the relative disadvantaged position of many black people’. More, ‘the “same for all” and “treat them all the same” approaches are major obstacles to achieving equality of opportunity, fair treatment and social justice’. They outline what they call ‘The System’, by which they mean ‘the organizational arrangements within large companies or institutions which determine how jobs are offered’. Their judgment is that ‘these bodies treat black people less favourably on racial grounds, because racism is an integral feature of organizational structures and individual attitudes’.3
These ways of looking at the question of equal opportunities make the case for positive action, over and above an ‘equal playing field’, because they identify forces that are outside of the ordinary considerations of who is best for the job as a persistent barrier to equality. The ideal of equality in the labour market is sabotaged before the position is advertised, they are saying.
The ways that the extra-economic foundations of discrimination are characterised are many. Many feminists have highlighted a patriarchal system in which power over women is defended and extended by men. Anti-racist activists have outlined what they see as a persistent institutional racism. These are explanations for the way that progress on equality at work has been so difficult.
Identifying the social factors that have stood in the way of equality has been a way of addressing those barriers. For some, though, talking up the limits to equality has turned from a positive programme of change to an excuse for its absence, or even a dogmatic insistence that change is not happening.
Without dealing with all the theoretical questions, we can identify the main barriers outside of work to equal opportunities at work. In this chapter first we will look at the trends in unpaid domestic work at home and its knock-on impact upon opportunities at work for women; second we consider the fraught question of national identity and the entrenched idea of a white indigenous people differentiated from the black other.
In both of these areas the course of events over the last 20 years suggests that many of the non-work bases of discrimination at work are in transition, and greatly diminished.
1. Work-Life Balance
In 1985 the Equal Opportunities Commission explained why it saw the question of equality at work closely tied to that of the burden of housework: ‘The Commission has recognised from the outset, a decade ago, that work and the family were inextricably linked’, stated the Equal Opportunities Commission in its 10th Annual Report: ‘inequality in the labour market was caused by, and in turn reinforced, an unequal burden of domestic responsibilities’. They were lobbying for extended parental leave and childcare, as a way of stopping job losses through pregnancy.4
A decade later they were making the point again, under the title ‘Reconciling Work and Family Life — Why Equality is Important’. ‘The difficulties of working parents and carers in balancing work and family responsibilities are major barriers to equality between men and women’, they wrote. Once again, they had in mind the weightiest family responsibility, childcare:
In dual-earner households, both partners need access to childcare, as may both partners in non-earning households. For couples with children, training or a return to the labour market is made more difficult by the absence of local childcare facilities.5
Childcare, as we have seen, was the main point that divided the Equal Opportunities Commission from the Conservative administrations between 1979 and 1991. There had indeed been a reduction in publicly funded nursery places.6 At that time many people thought that women with young children ought not to work — especially other women. It was a view echoed by the Prime Minister. Widening the question of equal pay to include social provision of childcare was a bold step beyond the Commission’s immediate responsibility for tackling discrimination at work.
One avenue that had been looked at was workplace nurseries. There had been some workplace nurseries in the Second World War, and the Greater London Council experimented with these. The Equal Opportunities Commission thought that workplace nurseries were ‘one form of childcare provision which both assist working parents and enable employers to recruited and retain qualified and trained staff’. They protested that these ought not to be a taxable benefit, backing a ‘workplace nurseries campaign’ which did win tax exemption. Workplace nurseries were opened at the Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, and at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. They tended to struggle to fill places, and these have now closed.7
The Commission kept up childcare on the public agenda. They commissioned and published a report, The Under-utilisation of Women in the Labour Market, written by Hilary Metcalf and Patricia Leighton, economists with the Institute of Manpower Studies. Identifying an untapped reserve of 6 million women not yet in the labour market, the authors found a major ‘constraint on those women who actually wish to work’ was ‘the cost and shortage of available quality childcare’. That was an issue ‘which is now at the forefront of national debate’, said the Commission:8 ‘Our message — that women and men should be encouraged to be effective and responsible employers and family members — has been disseminated far and wide round the country.’ Pointing out that that demand for labour was tighter, as the economy recovered towards the end of the Eighties, the Commission reported that ‘there has been heightened interest and awareness from all these quarters, notably employers wanting to know what is the best way forward on childcare’. It was at this point that the Commission raised the goal of a national framework for childcare — a formulation that put the case for government action without it sounding like town-hall socialism. ‘We see major contradictions in the Government policy in this area’, wrote the Commission: ‘the Government is keen to bring women into the workforce, but is unwilling to provide a national framework for childcare’. They welcomed the government’s giving childcare payments to lone parents on training courses, but demanded, why not ‘to women living with their husbands’?9
Commission chair Joanna Foster set out the position in a keynote speech:
Social policies are needed which reflect the changed reality of women’s lives, and of their families’ needs and experiences. A co-ordinated system of community-based childcare provis
ion, both for under-fives and older school-aged children, is a prerequisite for equality of opportunity.
She went on to say that:
Only when such support is available will women feel free to choose fulfilment from work as well as home, and men feel free to see themselves as participating fathers, husbands, family members as well as breadwinners.10
The Commission’s advice, drawing on a report titled Parents, Employment Rights and Childcare by Sally Holtermann and Karen Clarke, was that ‘the cost to government of a phased expansion of subsidized child-care — including out of school care as well as nursery places — would be more than outweighed by savings in social security and increased tax revenue’.11
In 1996 the EOC, having ‘worked on the issue of childcare for many years’, broadened the campaign: ‘we decided that it was time to try to establish a consensus on the need for a national strategy on childcare’. They set up ‘a working group to discuss the issues around childcare, a partnership of 21 organisations representing a wide spectrum of interests and expertise’. The working group argued that ‘expansion in childcare provision’ will ‘bring major benefits to employers by helping widen the pool of skills which are available and by retaining the investment in the skills of their existing workforce.’ For the government Cheryl Gillan at the Department of Education and Employment listened sympathetically. They told her that the ‘the benefits to employers of a childcare policy’ would include ‘the recruitment and retention of committed and experienced staff’, ‘recouping more of their investment in training’, ‘reduced absenteeism’, and ‘improvements in employee productivity’.12
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