Equality, Diversity and Disadvantage in Employment

The concept of equal opportunities is increasingly being replaced with the notion of the management of diversity. It has been a gradual drift, emanating from writers and organisations in the USA, travelling across to the UK and seeping into mainland Europe. In both theory and practice it offers a new challenge to both conceptualising and tackling the issues of equality, discrimination and injustice in employment. The chapters in this collection illuminate different aspects of these changing theoretical and practical problems. In particular they lay down two challenges. The first is to explore the nature of equality by analysing the framework, assumptions and policy implications that emerge from an approach of equal opportunity compared with the management of diversity. The second is to examine how groups become disadvantaged and unfairly discriminated against. This introduction is organised around these two analytical themes because this provides an opportunity to explore the common ideas and different tensions across the chapters as a whole. It further allows us to introduce the chapters through summarising their central ideas at the outset, rather than seeking to draw together the themes at the end; consequently, there is no concluding chapter. This, we argue, is a more dynamic way of integrating the chapters. In this respect, the introduction can be seen as the centre of a network of ideas, problems, dilemmas and themes that interlink the various chapters.

This chapter reviews the current debate about the concept of diversity management in organisations and its relationship to equal opportunities. It is concerned with the role managers play in the management of diversity initiatives, why this involvement often fails to deliver permanent change in organisational culture, systems and structures and how managers might work in an integrated ‘partnership’ within their organisations to implement diversity successfully. In particular, we have drawn our ideas from the European and North American traditions and literatures on equal opportunities and diversity management. To highlight a number of our views, a case study from the railway industry is presented to illustrate key points. Our broad conclusions are that a multidisciplinary and multifunctional approach is most likely to sustain the long-term and deep-rooted changes necessary for successful diversity management.

In common with many other trends in management thinking, the diversity approach to employment issues has the status of a product — in the form of a technique — that is sold to managers through consultancy work and instructional books. Consequently, there is the problem of arriving at a clear understanding of what is meant by this talk of ‘diversity’ given that we are dealing here with a concept that has been packaged and repackaged in a search for potential buyers, and so not only lacks any definitive formulation but offers formulations that are none too mindful of very real obscurities and difficulties.

Canada has become a multiracial, multicultural and multireligious society (Jain, 1987, 1993), whose growing ethnic diversity includes a large number of non-white Canadians, called visible minorities (VMs). They consist of several non-white groups including Chinese; South Asians (for example, East Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan); Blacks (for example, African, Haitian, Jamaican, Somali); Arabs (for example, Armenian, Egyptian, Iranian, Lebanese, Moroccan); Filipinos; East Asians (for example, Cambodian, Indonesian, Laotian, Vietnamese); Latin Americans; Japanese; and Koreans (Renaud and Norris, 1999). VMs comprised 11.2 per cent of the population and 10.3 per cent of the workforce in 1996. Part of the reason for the growth in the VM population has been rising levels of immigration from non-European countries. For instance, prior to 1961, VMs were only 3 per cent of all immigrants to Canada. In 1971–80, VM immigrant proportions rose to 51 per cent; in 1981–90, to 65 per cent; and in the period 1991–96, to 74 per cent (Norris, 1999). VM population and workforce rates have more than doubled since 1981; they constituted 4.7 per cent of the Canadian population in 1981, increased to 6.3 per cent in 1986, and to 9.4 per cent in 1991. The corresponding workforce rates were 4.7 per cent in 1981; 6.3 per cent in 1986; and 9.1 per cent in 1991.¹

Two apparently positive and interrelated pressures for change currently exist to reduce discrimination against the disabled at work. The first is the managing diversity movement, which focuses on organisations responding to the individual needs and aspirations of all disadvantaged people in the labour market as a way of eradicating discriminatory practices (Ross and Schneider, 1992). The second is through legislation which, for the first time in the UK, provides a statutory right for disabled employees or job applicants not to be discriminated against on the grounds of their disability. Both approaches emphasise the need to combat discrimination against the disabled through focusing on the individual needs of people who are labelled as having a disability. This chapter consequently explores the extent to which these apparently complimentary approaches to dissolving discrimination can actually achieve their ends.

In this chapter we examine the definition and nature of gender equality cross-nationally and the obstacles to applying a common integrated framework. It is based on research carried out under a NOW (New Opportunities for Women) programme with partners in Britain, Denmark and Spain, which focused on achieving equality in a highly male-dominated sector — the construction industry. ‘Equality’ assumed different meanings in the different national contexts and equal opportunities policies varied significantly.

The promotion of employment equality by trade unions is especially important in the UK. Although legal regulation of the employment relationship has increased, the individualised, private law model characteristic of the UK means legal rights can often remain merely formal entitlements. In the absence of a general labour inspectorate for monitoring and enforcing legal protections, the UK system largely leaves employers and trade unions to translate statute and case law voluntarily through collective bargaining. The recent history of such equality bargaining, and the prospects for it, are the core themes of this chapter.

Ageism is not simply another ‘ism’. It is similar to other prominent forms of discrimination in so far as ageism, sexism and racism ‘are three philosophies that we find offensive and which we would expect ordinary, liberal, tolerant, intelligent people to be against’ (Bytheway, 1995: 9). There are also, however, significant points of dissimilarity.

Marx’s famous dictum that history is made by human beings but not under conditions that they choose is widely accepted by social scientists. Its attraction stems from the fact that it succinctly expresses the need to give due weight to both agency and structure. Social change is only possible because of human action but such action is in turn constrained by social forces. And yet when we examine research on race and ethnicity, we find that it tends either to highlight the structural forces which result in the social exclusion of particular racially defined groups or to celebrate the actions of human beings in sustaining distinct ethnic cultures. Marx’s dictum seems to have been forgotten.

Work is essential to all societies: it produces the means of sustaining life, and those excluded from work are also excluded from vital social relationships (Oliver, 1991). Despite concerted efforts by some employers to seek equality of opportunity for disabled people, and notwithstanding recent growth in technology as an enabling resource (Roulstone, 1998), criticism remains concerning high levels of unemployment for this particular social group (for example, Morrell, 1990; Oliver, 1991; Reynolds, 1994).

Ed Balls, the advisor to the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, saw British men as having lost ‘the battle of the sexes’ for jobs by the mid-1990s (Balls, 1994; Coward, 1999). Indeed, in certain areas of Britain, women are as likely to have a job as men (Benn, 1998). Unemployment trends, especially for the less-qualified, certainly give the impression that men in Britain are losing out in the share of all the jobs available. Feminisation of employment does not spell the feminisation of power, but some writers have suggested it means the feminisation of men (McDowell, 1991), whilst others argue that it may signal a shift in gender relations (Bradley, 1998). The British Equal Opportunities Commission have increasingly taken up complaints from men about sex discrimination (EOC, 1996).