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 women’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.