Ethnicity and Gender at Work

This book explores the position of women from minority ethnic backgrounds as workers in contemporary labour markets. What jobs do they do? Do they work full-time or in ‘non-standard contracts’? Are they clustered in particular sectors or occupations? How does their pay compare to workers in other social categories? Are they benefiting from recent processes of social and economic change or are they among those losing out as neo-liberal economic policies seek to secure ‘flexibility’ in the highly competitive global marketplace? How do they view their jobs? Are they committed to developing careers? What problems do they face? Are they experiencing racism and sexism within their jobs and how are current governmental and organisational policies on equality and diversity addressing this? How do they combine their jobs with their family responsibilities? What can trade unions do to assist them and cater for their specific needs? How can unions work more effectively with minority community organisations and agencies? How are these women’s experiences affected by their differing class backgrounds and ethnic affiliations?

Soraya was born in Guyana, but has lived in England for 13 years, in an inner-city area in Bristol. In Guyana her grandfather was a rice farmer, and both her parents owned small shops. Soraya trained as a secretary, but when she came to England she desperately needed work and wound up peeling potatoes for £1.80 an hour in a restaurant. A friend suggested she applied for a job as a domestic in a nursing home, and thus commenced Soraya’s career as a carer. Subsequently, she joined an agency and held jobs as a nursing auxiliary in numerous hospitals and care homes. She finally quit the agency for a permanent job in a school for disabled children, which she loves. She resisted pressures to train as a nurse as she believed it would take her away from the caring work to which she is committed. Soraya’s husband suffers from poor health, so she provides economic stability for him and her grown-up son when he is unable to work.

The contemporary labour market position of minority ethnic women was explored in the last chapter. It is clear that black and minority ethnic women are disadvantaged in a range of ways despite their often high human capital. How do we explain this? This chapter offers a number of key theoretical and conceptual approaches that go some way to understanding how inequalities are reproduced in the labour market. Critical concepts we draw on include: the nature of intersectionality the importance of history in the social construction of inequalities; inequalities in organisations; segregation — both horizontal and vertical; the cycle of reproduction of segregation; the importance of ‘career’; ‘choice’ and inequality regimes. These concepts will be of value in shaping the discussion at different points in the book. We argue the importance of the interrelationship of structure and agency in understanding both the transformation and the reproduction of gendered and racist practices. The prioritising of identities at moments in time will intersect with agency and structures in influencing both transformation and reproduction. The importance of levels of analysis from the macro to the micro to the self, and the impact of historical factors at these levels, will enable an understanding of the uneven and sometimes contradictory developments in both transforming and reproducing a sexist and racist order.

In this chapter we consider the role played by the government in promoting policies which challenge discrimination. Early theorising on the state, including its welfare arm, tended to portray it as patriarchal and imperialist and, above all, capitalist. It was seen first and foremost to serve the interests of ‘Big Business’ and to help it exploit women and racialised minorities by using them as cheap sources of labour. The British state was described as patriarchal by feminists in the decades after the war, in that its security policy was predicated upon a view of the family which saw men as breadwinners and women as dependants, thus reinforcing male power and authority in the family (Barrett 1980; Wilson 1977). Other feminists also pointed to the failure of the British state to protect women from domestic violence and rape (Edwards 1981; Smart 1984). Amina Mama (1984), in a powerful critique of the British state’s approach to black women, pointed to the way the state tended to pathologise black families and present black women’s fertility as a threat, leading to attempts to limit their reproductive capacities through the use of contraceptives such as Depo-provera.

Employers are central to any discussion on inequalities. They and their agents have the hierarchical power to influence if not determine the shape and degree of inequalities in their organisations. This important component was identified in Chapter 3 by drawing on the work of Acker (2006). Employers set the standards of behaviour, monitor those standards and have the power to punish or condone those who do not conform to the set standards. In most countries the employers are the authors of the rules in the workplace. To some extent as we saw in Chapter 4, this authorship is mediated by government intervention through legislation. In rarer cases, trade unions may be joint authors of organisational rules through collective bargaining and more recently through partnership agreements.

In 2000, Britain’s largest trade union, UNISON, issued its own charter for black women. Such charters have become popular as part of a move to make trade unions appear more democratic and inclusive and thus appeal to new potential areas of membership. The TUC produced its first Charter for Women in 1979. The TUC and its constituent unions have made some real efforts to follow the precepts of the charters they have introduced.

This chapter continues to present material about our participants’ lives, drawing on their own narrative accounts. In it we focus on the practices and structures that serve to exclude women both in their workplaces and sometimes within their trade unions. But we shall also be looking at the ways in which the unions have opened doors for women and offered them opportunities to exercise their talents in a way that allows them to gain confidence and standing within their organisations. The message here is that, despite some inadequacies, unions have a most important role in helping women confront racism and sexism at work. In particular through the SOGs and black networks they have opened up spaces for BME women to help them fulfil what Julia Sudbury (1998) has called ‘other kinds of dreams’. Despite the problems with SOGs which we discussed in Chapter 6, we consider these types of organisation are absolutely crucial mechanisms of inclusion and would argue strongly for their continuation.

In Chapter 3, we introduced the concept of the ‘career’ and defined it as the ‘the dialectical relationship between self and circumstance’ (1985). This relationship encapsulates perfectly the careers of the women in our study. To capture the richness and complexity of their careers is a challenge. We have charted already their experiences of exclusion in Chapter 8, and in Chapter 10 we shall explore their union careers.

In Chapter 9 we considered women’s subjective and objective organisational careers. In this chapter we consider how subjective and objective factors lead to union careers. A unionised context shapes the circumstances in which a union may enable or constrain career development. The trade union role has been more associated with the defence of jobs and their equitable allocation than with the promotion of individual careers. Evetts (1992:16) pointed to the influence of macro-level actors such as representatives of employers and governments, trade unions and professional associations in the interactions and negotiations of career structures. Yet at the level of the organisation, the literature tends to treat career as an individualistic process (e.g., Arnold 1997; Donnelly 1992), thus neglecting the value of collective insights. Exceptions to this include Waddington and Whitston’s (1996) study of union joining and bargaining preferences, which showed that white-collar staff place great emphasis on union involvement in setting the parameters within which careers may be pursued. Similarly, Healy (1999) demonstrated that unionised teachers recognised the union role in career development.

In the last three chapters we have studied the experiences of minority ethnic women in workplaces and unions, with a particular focus on careers as a central focus of their activities. In this chapter, however, we move to a broader focus, showing how the women’s working lives intersect with their community and family roles and concerns, and also with their broader political interests.

In its valedictory report before being merged into the new Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which was entitled The Gender Agenda: The unfinished revolution, the EOC highlighted the following economic gulfs between women and men: