Somewhere between 1965 and 2005 British attitudes on race and sex discrimination went through a sea-change. Broadly, the common belief that white people were better than black people, and that men were better than women, was challenged. There are many sides to that challenge, but this book just looks at one, equal opportunities in the workplace. Before the 1970s there were no workplaces that had equal opportunities policies. Today, the great majority of people at work are covered by such a policy – as they are covered by many acts of parliament drafted to guarantee equality at work.
There are a great many books written about diversity at work. Many of these are handbooks for employers and human resource managers, or they are addressed to employees and their representatives. As valuable as those are, they do not show the change that took place in the later part of the twentieth century. Talking to students about these questions many are generally aware that social attitudes in the past were very different. But it is harder for them to see how it was that things changed. The publications about discrimination at work do not address the question why equal opportunities policies arose, what the social conditions were that led to their success.
This book is written as a history, drawn from published sources. It also relies a lot on my own records and recollections of the time, and those of my peers. It is strange to see arguments that were only just developing when I was younger settle down to become the basis of policies and practices that govern society today. The questions of inequality were urgent as I was growing up, when the country was fixated on immigration, its supposed threat to jobs, and also on the growing numbers of women at work, and the imagined damage that would do to family life. As students we protested against discrimination – I was thrown out of college after one occupation demanding nurseries for students with children. In the 1980s I worked at Haringey Council, which was at the centre of a great row with the government about equal opportunities for ethnic minorities, and then again about gay rights. The industrial struggles that were common in the 1970s carried on, right up to year-long miners’ strike against pit closures. But more and more, the argument in society was about oppression and discrimination, as well as about workers’ pay and conditions. I was only a bit-player in the culture wars of the 1980s, but they did unfold around me. The book draws on my experiences, and those of the many people alongside whom I worked and campaigned over questions of discrimination and workers’ rights over three decades. In particular I have leant on the advice and wisdom of Daniel Ben-Ami, Rosie Cuckston, Phil Hammond, Eve Kay, Chris Kyriakides, Kenan Malik, Munira Mirza, Mick Owens and Kevin Yuill. I am indebted too to Lizzie Terry and Tariq Goddard whose interest in this story helped the writing of it.
The book also draws on documents that I am embarrassed to think of now as historical sources, having seen them the first time around as so many surplus newsletters and policy briefs, often heading for the wastepaper bin. The work of the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission, as well as the many local authority and employers’ working groups on equality, were not well-respected at the time. They were often seen by conservatives as ‘social engineering’ and by radicals as tokenism — both criticisms that had some point. When I contacted the press office of the Human Rights Commission they were unaware of any history of their predecessor commissions (though there are in fact some retrospective accounts, as in the 25th Annual Report of the CRE). In reconstructing their history, and that of the other local government and workplace bodies dealing with equal opportunities, my argument is that these organisations did have a greater impact than they are credited for, though the changes they heralded were also pushed forward by other changes in the way that work is organised.
Back then, many of us were pessimistic about the likelihood that the market system, capitalism, could be reformed, most especially in its dependence on discrimination against women and against black people. The case against oppression was one that seemed to demand a revolution against the whole social order. A revolution did take place, but not the one that we were hoping for. The revolution in workplace relations has been profound. It was a revolution that did not overthrow the market system, but instead perfected it. Many of the things that we thought were unlikely to happen under capitalism, like a general belief in equality between men and women, and even a general belief in equality between white and black, did happen. The discrimination that we thought was going to get worse, got better. But the improvement of the position of women relative to men, and of black people relative to white people, took place in the context of a worsening of the position of all working people, relative to their employers. The position of the working classes overall, which we hoped would get better, has gotten much worse. Trying to understand the contradictions of the equal opportunities revolution is what we set out to do here.