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‘If you ever do manage to get a job, are your employers going to treat you fairly in your appraisal, pay rise request, or disciplinary procedure?’ Photograph: Alamy
‘If you ever do manage to get a job, are your employers going to treat you fairly in your appraisal, pay rise request, or disciplinary procedure?’ Photograph: Alamy

Racism still festers in Britain’s workplaces. It’s time to get tough

This article is more than 5 years old
A study shows that discrimination has barely shifted in 50 years. Diversity training is not enough – employers must face sanctions

“No, we won’t hire you because of the colour of your skin.” Such explicit racism was heard in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama – and in 1960s Birmingham, England, too. Fifty years on, an important study has found that people may be less explicit about it, but employers are still refusing to consider people for jobs merely because of their background. It’s not your skills, talent or effort that counts, but your race or ethnicity.

The research, led by Professor Anthony Heath from Nuffield College, Oxford, found that minority ethnic applicants have to send in around 60% more CVs to get a job interview. The findings are in line with many previous studies since 1967. The nature of this research means we can rule out other explanations (say, class or education) for differences in callback rates. It’s not “unconscious bias” when a black or Asian person’s CV is thrown in the bin even when they have the same qualifications as a white person – it’s racial discrimination.

We might have expected discrimination in Britain to have improved over five decades. There has been generational and attitudinal change, race relations legislation, the narrowing and sometimes reversing of the educational attainment gap – and more than four million BME people are now British-born. In this context, the fact that discrimination has barely budged is particularly striking and dispiriting.

The research has wider implications, in the labour market and more generally. If it is that hard to secure a job interview just because of your name, it makes you wonder: if you ever do manage to get a job, are those same employers going to magically drop prejudices and treat you fairly in your appraisal, pay-rise request, or disciplinary procedure? And will these attitudes simply disappear on the street, or in shops and restaurants?

Name-blind CVs have in the past been offered as a panacea for application discrimination, but such measures will only ever be moderately effective, given evidence of even more extensive discrimination in the interview process than in the callback phase.

What, then, should we do? We can’t simply keep trying the same approach. To tackle the persistence and extent of racial discrimination in the labour market, we need to go beyond a compliance or carrot approach – and use sticks or disincentives, too.

‘Legal aid cuts must be reversed so that employees can bring race discrimination cases.’ Photograph: Matthew Cooper/PA

There is scope for more sanctioning measures within existing race relations and equality law, by strengthening the powers of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Legal-aid cuts must be reversed so that employees can bring race discrimination cases. We need fines for employers, especially for repeat offenders. This may mean fewer non-disclosure agreements, or perhaps disclosing race discrimination cases to the regulator only (the EHRC), so that lessons are properly learned.

If employers are worried about the costs to their reputations, they might reflect on how the costs of racial discrimination are currently being paid by Britain’s eight million BME people. A government-commissioned review by Baroness McGregor-Smith estimated the cost to the country of such discrimination to be £24bn a year – or £3,000 for every BME person in Britain.

Collecting data is vital, but if evidence alone was enough we’d have seen more progress over the past 50 years. That data should underpin tougher measures: targets for hiring as well as for promotion; appraisals to include how managers progress BME staff; executive pay packages tied to their organisation’s ability to improve key measures such as hiring, pay, retention, tribunals and disciplinary processes.

Rather than asking how individuals must change to “fit” into existing organisations, these institutions must change so that they provide equality for all their employees. Twenty years on from the Macpherson report, Britain still doesn’t seem to understand what racism is – or its wider effects. We clearly need to improve the teaching of history and racism in our schools and how that reality is depicted on our screens. More immediately, institutions should be the focus, specifically the places where white middle-class graduates are most likely to be the key decision-makers.

A carrot-based approach has been tried over 50 years, in different guises, with limited success. If the cause is racism, the solution can’t be mere diversity training. We need to talk honestly about race, and racism, however difficult those conversations will be. It’s time to get tougher and develop sanctions – or sticks – if we’re serious about uprooting racism in the workplace and in Britain.

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