The Equal Opportunities Revolution

by James Heartfield

  Looking back at the contradictions of the equal opportunities revolution, what stands out is that the top-down anti-discrimination measures reveal themselves to be instruments of labour discipline, in the hands of the employers and the authorities, to dominate employees. Even where these acts of domination are in favour of minorities, they enhance the power of the elite over the mass. More, the policies derive their power from division. Diversity in the workforce, diversity in society, must be managed. As Kimberlé Crenshaw argues it, diversity is not to be overcome, but maintained and formalised. Policies and organisations that were supposed to help to address inequality have ended up institutionalising it.

  Conclusion

  Between 1975 and 1995 Britain underwent a revolution in relations at work that saw women and black people overturn the subordinate role they had played in the workforce. Workplace reform echoed a wider debate in society about equality, and a change that came with far greater numbers of women and black and Asian people in the workplace.

  Sexism and racism were not abolished, but discrimination at work was first outlawed, and then companies adopted policies to promote equal opportunities. In particular, the decade 1980-90 is the decade in which equal opportunities policies became the norm — at the beginning of that decade only Camden and Lambeth Councils had an equal opportunities policy, but by the end most employees in Britain were covered by equal opportunities policies.

  The timing of the equal opportunities policy is surprising. It coincides with a government that was known for its hostility to workers’ rights, for its aggressive policies of policing black youth and immigrants, and for its traditional, family-oriented outlook.

  The settlement between labour and capital that was made in the late nineteenth century, and institutionalised in the twentieth, was dismantled from 1980 onwards. That settlement was based upon a hierarchy of working men, the idea at least of the family wage, with women as a reserve army of labour; further it bedded down a patriotic feeling for a corporatist state, with a promise to organised labour in Britain that it was more highly regarded than migrant labour. Though those two strands of sex and colour chauvinism were stated yet more firmly by government in the 1980s, the social institutions they were built upon were being dismantled in the name of a free market in labour. Against their explicit intentions, the Conservative government opened up the labour market to women and to black Britons, when it tore up the post-war social consensus. Equal opportunities policies seemed to be coming from a very different place than the anti-union laws. But they did make sense to employers who were looking for a new agreement with their workforces. The equal opportunities revolution supplanted the old social democratic consensus, which, while it was generous to labour, was hierarchical as regards sex and colour.

  The first take-up of equal opportunities policies, by London’s left-wing Labour councils, was in a spirit of opposition to the Conservative government, and their promotion by the two Commissions — for Racial Equality and Equal Opportunities — were cold-shouldered by Whitehall. Over time, though, many more employers in the private as well as the public sector took up equal opportunities policies. They did so for many reasons, often because they felt they had to comply with the law, and with European directives, but increasingly because they felt they were both morally right and also good business sense.

  It is a view that has been backed up again and again. In 2015, McKinsey looked at what diversity did for business in ‘366 public companies across a range of industries in Canada, Latin America, the United Kingdom, and the United States’. They worked out that ‘Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians’. They found that gender diversity put you 15% ahead.1

  Behind the business case for equal opportunities lay a fear on the part of employers that they needed a moral motivation for their authority. Gaining by the reorganisation of industry, and having shed their prior commitments to partnership with trade unions, employers’ equal opportunities policies recreated a sense that both sides of industry were in it together. After a decade of harsh conflict at work, rebuilding their reputation as ‘equal opportunity employers’ was an important moral appeal to their own workers, and to wider society.

  The old order that the new Human Resource Management replaced was one that had raised up the industrial worker as a partner at work. That old order was struck with organisations that had their roots in a workforce in which women and immigrant workers were second-class. The defeat of organised labour in the many struggles of the 1980s did have the surprising result of opening up the labour market to those formerly excluded women and migrant workers. Jamie Allinson says ‘neo-liberal capitalism positing the rights of an abstract market individual against inherited practices, has permitted much more progress on “social” questions’.2 It is worth noting that the progress on the social questions has not dislodged, but rather reinforced the authority of employers over the workforces.

  The quasi-governmental commissions, the EOC and the CRE, were often mocked for their tokenistic and piecemeal approach. Much of that criticism was justified. But the shift in social attitudes that they register is an important measure of the real struggles that ordinary women and men engaged in to win their rights. The outcome of those struggles was mixed.

  The equal opportunities revolution came about with the defeat of organised labour. Bringing more women and more migrants into a greatly expanded workforce has not hurt business, but on the contrary, helped it to grow. The relative social position of women and of migrants has improved — too slowly, but it has improved all the same. But the overall position of the working classes relative to their employers has greatly suffered. Inequality of incomes, and more so, inequality of wealth, has opened up while equal opportunities between sexes and races has improved.

  The intensity of work has also got worse. And double-income households are time-poor as they are work-rich. Hugh Cunningham points to:

  The entry of married women into the workforce, the increase in hours of work in key sectors of the economy, the evidence of greater intensity of that work, the removal since the 1970s of what were regarded as impediments to a flexible labour force, but were actually means of preventing the crisis in time use that is wrapped up and concealed by talking about work-life balance.3

  To be employed is to be used. What we call equality in employment is the right to be used. We measure the increase in equal opportunities in the subordination of ever greater numbers of people to the wage labour-capital relation.

  At work, and in society generally, the questions of sex and race are in one sense greatly improved. Discrimination at work as in wider society is largely illegal and morally repugnant to most. But our perceptions are that these relations are more difficult than ever. The formal systems for managing sex and race relations at work have problematized them, and increased our sensitivity to conflict. Ironically, the real positions of the sexes, and of people of different races, are much closer than they have been. The divisions of the past, where men worked and women stayed at home, are long gone. There are many more racially mixed relationships and racially mixed people than before. But at the same time there is a greater pessimism about race relations, and also about relations between the sexes.

  The aspiration to equality is a powerful driving force in a modern society. It has pushed forward the equal opportunities revolution. The yearning for equality is strong first because it is already present in the mutual respect that people feel they owe one another, as the basis of all possible interaction; but at the same time, we feel defensive of equality because it is so often thwarted by the great inequalities of wealth and social power. Most people feel a strong affinity with the stories of oppression and liberation that we tell ourselves again and again. We identify with the struggle of the civil rights leaders in America and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, as we do with the Suffragettes’ fight for the vote, the Dagenham wo
men’s struggle for equal pay, and the Stonewall rioters’ fight for respect. That identification comes from the real sense that many feel that their own status is undermined, and that the dominant fist hides behind the façade of equality. The structures of inequality are changing all the time. To meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must address what is emerging, as well as the decaying order that has held us back.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Barbara Kersley et al, Inside the Workplace: Findings from the 2004 WERS, London, Routledge, 2006, p 237; New Equals, Commission for Racial Equality, 11 April 1980

  2 1.76 million Asians; 757,010 black Africans and Afro-Caribbeans; and 700,000 mixed-race and other non-white people. Office for National Statistics, ‘Ethnicity and the Labour Market’, 2011 Census, England and Wales, 13 November 2014

  3 Jen Beaumont Population, Social Trends 41, London, Office for National Statistics, 2011, p 6

  4 ‘Life in the United Kingdom’, Home Office, HMSO, 2002, p 42, 45

  5 Derby Daily Telegraph, 25 November 1885

  6 Coventry Standard, 14 June 1918

  7 Yorkshire Post, 13 March 1943

  8 Free to Choose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1980, p 128

  9 Ibid, p 133

  10 Ibid, p 128

  11 Western Mail, 31 January 1914

  12 Walsall Observer, 24 March 1917

  13 Western Daily Press, 1 July 1927

  14 Hull Daily Mail, 31 December 1929

  15 Western Morning News, 18 June 1936

  16 Labour Party Manifesto, 1950

  17 Conservative Manifesto, 1950, http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/con50.htm

  18 Labour Manifesto, 1955

  19 Nancy Seear, Veronica Roberts, John Brock, A Career for Women in Industry, London, LSE, 1964, p 2

  20 Beatrix Campbell, Iron Ladies, London, Virago, 1987 gives a good account of the Conservative Party’s appeal to housewives

  21 TUC Congress Report, 1965

  22 Conservative Party Manifesto, 1970, http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/con70.htm

  23 February 1974, http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab74feb.htm

  24 Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, Nation Books, 2005, p 82

  25 David Perfect, ‘Briefing paper 2, Gender pay gaps’, Equality and Human Rights Commission

  26 Brynin and Güveli, ‘Understanding the ethnic pay gap in Britain’, Work, employment and society 26(4), p 574–87

  Chapter One

  1 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969, p 93, 94; Richard Croucher, Engineers at War, London, Merlin Press, 1982, p 2

  2 ‘Ethnicity and National Identity in England and Wales 2011’, Office for National Statistics, 11 December 2012; ‘A Vision of Britain through time’ University of Portsmouth, 2009-2014, http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/SRC_P/5/EW1911GEN

  3 Minqi Li, Feng Xiao, and Andong Zhu, Long Waves, Institutional Changes, and Historical Trends: A Study of the Long-Term Movement of the Profit Rate in the Capitalist World-Economy, p 40 — they define: ‘Profit rate = profit / net stock of private non-residential fixed capital’; Eric Williams wrote in his account of slavery’s contribution to capitalist take-off, Capitalism and Slavery, that ‘it must not be inferred that the triangular trade was solely and entirely responsible for the economic development. The growth of the internal market in England, the ploughing-in of the profits from industry to generate still further capital and achieve a still greater expansion, played a large part. But this industrial development, stimulated by mercantilism, later outgrew mercantilism and destroyed it.’ New York, Capricorn Books, 1966, p 105–6

  4 Karl Marx, Capital I, Chapter 16, Progress, Moscow, 1974, p 477

  5 Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Work, Mechanisation and the early phases of industrialisation in Britain’, in The Historical Meanings of Work, Patrick Joyce (ed), Cambridge University Press, 1987, p 73

  6 Marx to Siegfried Mayer, 9 April 1870, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm

  7 30 August 1883, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_08_30.htm

  8 Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo Torres, Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility, Stanford University Press, 2012, p 55

  9 Marx to Siegfried Mayer, 9 April 1870, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm

  10 ‘Gendered Discourses and the Making of Protective Labor Legislation in England, 1830–1914’, Journal of British Studies 37(2), April 1998, p 166; Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy

  11 Quoted in Marx, Capital I, p 267

  12 House of Commons, 12 March 1869, Hansard, vol. 194 § 1209

  13 Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood, London, BBC, 2006, p 166, 172

  14 Jane Lewis, Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940, Basil Blackwell, 1986, p 104

  15 G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, The Common People, London, Methuen, 1961, p 426; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, p 318

  16 HC Deb, 26 April 1876, vol 228, §1697; HC Deb, 16 March 1886, vol 303, §1016; HC Deb, 14 March 1884, vol 285, §1596

  17 Hilary Land, ‘The Family Wage’, Feminist Review 6, 1980, p 72 (Beveridge quoted), 60 (Arthur Howley quoted); Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘The origins and expansion of the male breadwinner family’, International Review of Social History 42, 1997, supplement, p 31

  18 Catherine Hakim, Work-Lifestyle Choices in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, University Press, 2000, p 59; Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty, London, Methuen, 1905, p 169; Alison Wolf, ‘Working Girls’, Prospect, April 2006

  19 Richard Price, Labour in British Society, London, Routledge, 1986, p 158, 145

  20 J.T. Murphy, Modern Trade Unionism, London, Routledge, 1935, p 7

  21 To the Daily Mail, in 1909, quoted in José Harris, Unemployment and Politics, Oxford, Clarendon, 1972, p 346

  22 R. Michels, Political Parties, London, Simon and Schuster, 1966, p 282

  23 Quoted in Bill Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, London, Duckworth, 1995, p 77

  24 Quoted in ibid, p 78

  25 Joseph Buckman, Immigrants and the Class Struggle: The Jewish Immigrant in Leeds, 1880-1914, Manchester University Press, 1983, p 132

  26 HL Deb, 3 August 1905, vol 151, §19

  27 Christopher Addison, Four and A Half Years, vol I, London, Hutchinson, 1934, p 225, 163

  28 Ibid, p 168; Charlotte Drake, 13 April 1915, in Sylvia Pankhurst: The Home Front, London, Cresset Library, 1987, p 160

  29 J. T. Murphy, Modern Trade Unionism, London, Routledge, 1935, p 7

  30 Quotes taken from Robert Clough, Labour: A Party Fit for Imperialism, London, Larkin, 1992, p 90, 92, 97

  31 Ralph Darlington, Dave Lyddon, Glorious Summer, London, Bookmarks, 2001, p 6, 9

  32 Huw Benyon, Working for Ford, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p 66

  33 ‘The Institutional Face at Ministerial Level’, in The Changing Institutional Face of British Employment Relations, Linda Dickens, Alan Neal (eds), Biggleswade, Kluwer, 2006, p 19

  34 HC Deb, 8 November 1976, vol 919, §27

  35 Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, London, Andre Deutsch, 1979, p 422, 408; ‘Mr. Butskell’s Dilemma’, Economist, 13 February 1954, p 439

  36 Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, London, HMSO, reprinted 1966, p 7

  37 Ibid, p 10–11

  38 Ibid, p 49

  39 Ibid, p 50

  40 Ibid, p 51–2

  41 Peter Yuen, Compendium of Health Statistics-2005-2006, Office of Health Economics, Oxford, Radcliffe Publishing, 2005, p 142

  42 Quoted in Irene Bruegel, ‘Anne Gray, The Future of Work and the Division of Childcare between Parents’, Social Science Research Papers 18, London South Bank University, March 2004

  43 Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society, Lond
on, Andre Deutsch, 1979, p 391, 392

  44 Kate Marshall, Real Freedom, London, Junius, 1982, p 79

  45 Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997, p 115

  46 Ibid, p 127; P. Hennessy, Prime Minister: the office and its holders since 1945, London, Penguin, 2001, p 205

  47 House of Commons, 23 March 1964

  48 Commission for Racial Equality Annual Report, 1986, p 18

  49 Published in 1971 by New Beacon Books; see also Beverly Bryan et al, The Heart of the Race, London, Virago, 1985, p 70–71. My mother, who was a teacher in Effra Road Junior School at the time, knew the book and Coard’s argument well. For contemporary segregation in schools by choice, see Sean Coughlan, ‘Study reveals school segregation’, BBC, 6 July 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-33409111

  50 Robert Clough, Labour: A Party Fit for Imperialism, London, Larkin, 1992, p 158

  51 Race Today Collective, “The Struggles of Asian Workers in Britain”, London, Race Today, 1983, p 8

  52 Race Today, May/June 1982, p 96

  53 Race Today, March 1983, p 210

  54 Beverly Bryan et al, The Heart of the Race, London, Virago, 1985, p 45

  55 Ann Kramer, Many Rivers to Cross, London, The Stationery Office, 2006; BBC: On This Day, ‘1966: Euston staff ‘colour bar ended’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/15/newsid_3043000/3043439.stm; Keith Thompson, Under Siege, London, Penguin, 1988, p 72

  56 Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries 1964-70, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984, p 562

  57 HL Deb, 18 March 1969, vol 300, §743

  58 ‘The Institutional Face at Ministerial Level’, in The Changing Institutional Face of British Employment Relations, Linda Dickens, Alan Neal (eds), Biggleswade, Kluwer, 2006, p 19

  59 Will Podmore, Reg Birch, London, Bellman Books, 2004, p 161–2

  60 Guardian, 11 July 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/11/frances-ogrady-tuc-sexism-union