Don't Be Trumped: Stay Woke!

In spite of widespread condemnation from a fairly wide range of people over his appalling comments about disabled people after the Potomac aircrash, Trump and the Orcs he has assembled to do his bidding are unabashedly doubling down to suspend and cancel Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies across the American government. Many private companies are doing the same.

This is apparently in the name of meritocracy: no one but properly qualified people should get jobs, especially in roles such as air traffic controllers (this example in spite of there as yet being no evidence that the ATC was at fault). The Buffoon-in-Chief seemed concerned that no "dwarves" should be in a control tower while his MAGA followers in the USA and far beyond (including plenty on our shores) have performatively claimed to be concerned for disabled people having to hold down such stressful roles. Only the best, they proclaim, the irony given the very clearly unqualified man in the Oval Office completely lost on them.

So what is DEI (or often in the UK EDI)? Is it the case that "positive action" is putting unsuitable people into jobs that put others at risk? Or at the very least stop the best person for the job getting it?

The short answer is "No".

For a long time, many, many jobs - in the air industry, but in fact in pretty much all industries and especially in management and technical roles - often did (and not infrequently still do) go to certain not-best-candidates purely because of their race and gender.

These are white men. Often older white men. Including ones wearing insta-tan.

Diversity programmes, in the USA and UK and many other countries, are not at all about putting unqualified people into jobs - quite the opposite. They are about ensuring that people often marginalised and discounted for jobs even where they are the best candidate are encouraged to apply and considered equally to the stale, pale males who believe these are their birth right.

A few years ago, the BBC did an interesting experiment: they created identical fake applications for 100 jobs in London - one from someone with the white British-sounding name "Adam"; one from someone with the Muslim sounding name "Mohammed". And guess what?

Although the applications were identical, Adam got 12 interviews; Mohammed got 4. Such blatant disparities were also found in similar experiments by Nuffield University and by Canadian researchers.

Having worked for much of my career in human resources in the not-for-profit sector, I have been involved with many diversity programmes: in not a single one of these has anyone but the candidate identified as the best qualified/suited to the role been appointed. Under UK law, other than in a small number of exceptions such as provision of personal care, if you appoint someone because of their gender or race, you are breaking it and liable to be sued by any better qualified candidate. You can't reserve roles or have quotas. All of these are discriminatory and in breach of discrimination law.

What you can do is include welcome statements in job adverts to encourage people from marginalised backgrounds to apply by reassuring them that they will be treated fairly. You can (and should) provide training on avoiding bias to your recruiters and on inclusion to line managers and others so that everyone feels welcome and comfortable in their places of work.

You can also offer training to help people from such backgrounds to be able to compete equally: so for example a positive action training programme or an internship targeted at applicants from an ethnic background currently under-represented in your workforce. But you can't then move that person into a permanent job without running foul of the law. They have to compete and be the best appointee. (I write with an understanding of UK law; US law is very similar.)

Who benefits from this? Well, the people who would otherwise have been discounted obviously get a fair chance; their employers benefit by getting the best person for the job; and society benefits by being better run and simply feeling more equitable.

It is unsurprising, looking at Trump's henchmen (and they are nearly all men), that they don't like DEI/EDI programmes and denounce them as "woke". Because these generally talent-free guys are simply not interested in fairness or equity. Such concepts offend them not least because they threaten them and their grasping, greedy hold on patriarchal power.

What is surprising to many of his MAGA followers though is who is affected by the suspension of DEI programmes. For, contrary to the racist myths put about by Team Trump (and others of their ilk), the people who have benefited most of all from US DEI programmes are not black people or illegal immigrants; nor disabled or trans-people. It has actually been women from poorer white backgrounds: a substantial part of his voting base.

And now that he's elected, much to the upset of thousands of them as he purges government offices and programmes of the calumny of equity, he has, tragically, only three words for them:

"You are fired."

To be fair to the sociopath, back in September, he did warn them...

In The Name of the Holy Goat

The last week has seen the Church in both England and Scotland split over issues of discrimination. Following the lead of some of their American and African counterparts, the Anglican and Presbyterian denominations have been struggling over sharply differing views of the role of the Bible in contemporary Christian thinking and its status as the Word of God, and what that in turn means in practice.

There is sharply different thinking between those who believe the Bible to be the literal Word of God and those who seek a degree of interpretation - and so the debate has raged, with passages from the Bible quoted by both sides.

So, what does the Bible have to say on the issue of men with beards? A number of these individuals have infiltrated the highest echelons of the Anglican Church in particular, causing consternation for some followers who fear they will next suggest Jesus wasn't even a white guy!

Consider this: Leviticus 21.5 says: They shall not make bald patches on their heads, nor shave off the edges of their beards, nor make any cuts on their body.

Jeremiah 48.37 , admittedly not the happiest bunny in the Bible, sees the idea of shaving as not the most positive event: For every head is shaved and every beard cut off. On all the hands are gashes, and around the waist is sackcloth (Sounds like a pretty grim experience Jerry had at the bathroom mirror, though in context he was writing before safety razors were invented - aha, but "context" is precisely the sort of revisionism we need to be careful about!)

Later on from the Bible writings came the Church Fathers, and, praise the Lord, they are pretty clear - shaving is for girls! 

"How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them! ... For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He has adorned man, like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest, a sign of strength and rule." - Clement of Alexandria (vol. 2, p. 275)

Yep, beards are good; razors the implements of Satan.

So, as we contemplate all these namby-pamby, bare-faced Bible deniers like Pastor Fred Phelps, preacher Mike "Shagger" Reid, Governor Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich, you have to ask where's the beards? These perverts stand chin-naked before the Lord, picking and choosing which bits of the Bible they want to believe - like stoning homosexuals and demonising rape victims - and which bits they want to forget about (beards!) like the demon-worshipping dilettantes they clearly are. What a shocking example to young people! What an abomination, undermining western values and abandoning all the good facial hair to the Muslims and Jews...

At least in England, one man stands out, no girly priest in the contest for the Yorkie Bar of Faith: praise the Lord for Archbishop Rowan Williams and his Mighty Fuzzface! This is Muscular Christianity at its Bible Best! A Real Man and His Real Beard - let no one tear asunder!

The only razor is his mind - his Mighty Fuzziness

The Terrible Burden of Equality

Since the 1970s, the concept of equality of treatment in the workplace has become more and more part of the accepted culture in Britain - which does not mean for a moment that it has been achieved, but relatively few would argue that it is not both ethically and indeed in terms of business efficiency the best way to work. Discrimination has been outlawed in terms of disability, gender, sexual orientation, age, race, transgender and belief/non-belief. There are exceptions where these are valid - for example, a church can require priests to be Christians; care homes can recruit male or female staff as necessary to ensure the privacy of their clients; and theatre directors can employ actors according to role requirements, and so on. In 2010, these were drawn together into the single Equality Act, which added the need to not discriminate on grounds of social background and required employers to protect their staff against discrimination by third parties, such as clients and customers.

These laws, as Home Secretary Roy Jenkins spoke of the first of them, provide a basic floor of rights - they are not rigid, nor stupidly dogmatic as the likes of the Daily Mail would have you think - political correctness gone mad! They have not achieved all their objectives - women, for example, still earn significantly less than men overall - but, working in Human Resources as I do, equality laws have made a huge difference in general attitudes over the last twenty years or so, and from the perspective of working to improve processes and culture within organisations, they have provided a major impetus in challenging attitudes and, in turn, changing behaviour.

So it is utterly depressing, though unsurprising, now to discover that the Coalition Government is reviewing these workplace equality laws in the name of cutting the awful burden of red tape, which even now is apparently holding back billionaire investors from pouring cash into job creation in the UK. In particular, they are looking to abolish:

1. the rule that employers are liable for repeated discriminatory harassment of their staff by people from outside their organisation where inadequate steps have been taken to prevent it; 
2. the ‘questionnaire procedure’ that enables people who think they have been unlawfully discriminated against to seek information and explanations from the person they believe has discriminated against them; 
3. the power given to Employment Tribunals to recommend that an employer take certain steps to avoid others being affected by discrimination. 

In defence of the planned abolition, the Government argues that, for example in the case of harassment, good employers would still take action to stop harassment of their staff because, if they didn't, morale would get poor and performance suffer and staff leave.

A few points on that argument:
- good employers would take action; but if all employers were good, we wouldn't have needed the law to begin with and it wouldn't create a "burden" on anyone as they would already be doing what it required. There are plenty of bad employers.
- in the absence of the law, it will be harder for good employers to take action against harassers, as they will not have the backing of the law to do this.
- morale may get poor and staff leave - yes, they may do, and the harassers will have won and discrimination will have won.

So, in other words, if a member of the public comes in and makes offensive remarks to a disabled member of staff, their employer will be able to tell the staff member, "too bad, not my problem." And their only recourse will be to resign. One-nil to discrimination.

And on the other points:
- the questionnaire procedure is rarely used; but when it is, it is actually very helpful to an employer facing an employment tribunal complaint in terms of understanding the complaint and assessing whether or not the employer is, in fact, at fault and should seek to settle the claim. It IS a bit of paper, but it can save lots of other bits of paper and hours and days of litigation. Abolishing this would be a really counter-productive own goal, though our headline grabbing Government will doubtless portray it as a nail in the coffin of litigants.

- and the suggestion that, having found that someone has been discriminated against, employment tribunals will no longer be able to make recommendations for changing practice to the employer to prevent similar problems in future. How is this a burden of red tape as opposed to very useful advice to help the employer avoid similar problems and costs in the future and end discrimination against employees who have not yet gone to a tribunal?

Unless of course, deep down, you don't actually believe in equality. Unless, in fact, discrimination actually is your cup of tea and, chipping away, bit by bit, line by line, you'd rather refashion the Equality Act 2010 into the Charter for Bigots 2015.

From Baloo's Cartoon Blog

The Regime is carrying out a supposed consultation exercise on these proposals. Anyone can comment on them via this link. 

Link to consultation papers (closing date for responses 7 August 2012) http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/equalities/

Sacking with CONfidence (Part 5)

Yet another update on the right-wing populist and often ignorantly uninformed slaughter of employment law and protection of employees in Britain.

So yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of Mrs Windsor, who has never attended a job interview in her life but who has a pretty mean track record when it comes to maltreatment of her staff in the low wage Royal Household, informing us how her Government intends to create more flexibility for employers. This will give them even more opportunities to rip off customers and staff alike by making it even easier for people to be dismissed without any chance of recompense. Lizzie's family has already got form in trying to break employment tribunal rules and withhold legal evidence, so it seems she is happy for her Ministers to make life a bit easier for the likes of her son in future employment disputes.

Get to work and be grateful, peasants!

Not content with doubling from one to two years the period of time employees new to a company can be dismissed for absolutely no reason at all, the Con Dem Government has brought forward  a series of measures to make it much harder for people who have been dismissed to raise any complaint at an Employment Tribunal. the quality of the legislation mooted in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill betrays the fact that the legislation is pretty much about Tory prejudice against all employment rights rather than a serious attempt to reform the law.

For example, in the name of reducing the number of tribunals, people pursuing a complaint will have to first lodge their complaint with ACAS in an attempt to reach a conciliated settlement. This appears to be in total ignorance of the fact that this already happens - all tribunal claims are automatically lodged with ACAS and a conciliation officer is appointed to try to broker a solution. If what is perhaps implied here is that there is a new stage of conciliation via ACAS before you can even lodge a claim to a tribunal, this suggests a number of inbuilt flaws, which probably combine hostility towards employees with a lack of understanding of how the current system works.

1. If the conciliation stage is a separate phase to the tribunal complaint, this seems to be adding to red tape rather than reducing it.

2. Tribunal awards usually pay compensation for loss of earnings to successful complainants for the period of time from the end of employment to the conclusion of the tribunal process. An additional phase of conciliation will extend this period of time, which means either employers face higher costs at the end if an employee is successful OR the Government is going to reduce the amount of compensation available even when a claim of unfair dismissal is successful - any ideas which option this Government might take?

3. Nearly two-thirds of employment tribunal complaints are already conciliated - half by ACAS and the rest privately. Few people enjoy taking their employer to a tribunal - I know, having been involved on both sides often enough - so the conciliation process is already pretty effective. Dragging things out when conciliation is not possible will simply make the process much harder on many levels for both sides - but perhaps the Government calculation is that this will deter people from asserting their rights even when they have been bullied or harassed out of their livelihoods - so much for justice.

4. The tribunal system is in much need of reform: it works essentially for two groups alone - lawyers and people with tenuous claims. People who have genuinely lost their jobs unfairly get piss poor awards averaging less than £9,000 - the fantastic six figure sums touted with some furious fanfare in the likes of the Daily Mail are news precisely because they are few and far between. However, the current round of so-called reform will do little to change this. Instead, it will simply deter yet further people in vulnerable situations from asserting what tiny amount of power they have in the employment relationship, which remains even now governed at its core by the ancient laws of Master and Servant.

In the despair of the Lib Dem wing of the Coalition, a few of their number have suggested that they might not be so enthusiastic about these new proposals, but let it not be forgotten that the most pernicious changes to employment rights so far have been driven forward by Lib Dem Ministers in the name of cutting red tape, and even their adjustments to existing laws on family leave (actually a confirmation of plans put in place by the Labour Government pre-2010) include a reduction in maternity leave rights for expectant mothers.

But then, the Lib Dems have been weak on employment rights for people for a long time now, ignoring the fact that over 85% of the workforce are employees and so the protections afforded against arbitrary dismissal are important to a large number of us ordinary mortals. In 2005, Clegg's predecessor, the supposedly social democratic Charles Kennedy fought the General Election on a platform of seeking "a bonfire of the red tape" that allegedly stifles employment in the UK.

Seven years ago, in my final days of Lib Dem membership, I was irate about reading that their MEPs were supporting the continuation of the British opt-out of the European Working Time Directive, which has prevented workers from having to work excessive hours across the Continent - apart from in Britain thanks to the opt-out negotiated by the Tories in 1992. I wrote to the then leader of the Lib Dem MEPs, Chris Davies. His reply could easily have come from any Tory backbencher, so packed it was with prejudice against workers - and it was the final thing, of many, which tipped me into leaving and joining the Greens.

The text is below: so, don't let anyone fool you - the legislative drive to weaken our employment security in the middle of a recession is very much the offspring of both parts of this most poisonous regime, which seems to view its own citizens as its enemy.

(bold italics are my emphases)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sent: 13 May 2005 14:54
To: chrisdaviesmep@cix.co.uk
Subject: Working time regulations

Dear Chris Davies,

I have been a member of the Liberal Democrats and our predecessor parties for 27 years and am writing to you after reading about our MEP's vote against the proposed changes to the EU working time regulations this week, including your own criticisms on your website about the vote to end the 48 hours maximum average working week opt-out.

I am surprised and disappointed by the Lib Dem MEPs approach to the proposed changes. I am also quite baffled by your comments that most people work a 37 hour week in the UK, but as a point of principle, people should be able to choose to work longer.

The fact is that most recent surveys indicate the averge working week in Britain is actually around 42 hours and, as I am sure you must be aware of, a "long hours culture" exists in many industries, especially among lower paid workers. While, since slavery is illegal, as a legal technicality they may "choose" to work longer than their contracted hours, the fact is that very often they have no realistic choice if they wish to avoid punitive action against them by their employer. A recent TUC survey found that less than 1-in-3 people who regularly work more than 48 hours per week have ever been asked to sign the legally required opt-out and there have been instances of people being told they had to sign the opt-out a a condition of their employment. To suggest therefore that "choice" enters into the equation for the vast majority of people who are expected to work long hours is quite frankly misguided.

The regulations as proposed would average the working week over an entire year - it is not as if people could never work more than 48 hours in any one week, or even for quite prolonged periods. It simply requires that over a full year, people do not work more than this on average. I don't know about you, but if I had a relative requiring care, or was myself being driven on a bus or train, I would feel very concerned if the person administering drugs or driving the bus/train had really been working more than 48 hours that week and had been doing so routinely. In addition, regular long hours of work make the worker more prone to both short-term illnesses such as flu or colds from a reduced immune system and longer terms diseases such as diabetes and heart condtions, which can be of little good to the worker, or, for that matter, their employer in the long run.

I am quite astonished that Lib Dems are taking such a stance - where is the care about people that we have campaigned on for years (remember "People First"?)? Liberals were among the first, decades ago, to introduce health and safety requirements to the workplace, tackling both moral and productivity issues at the same time. I regret deeply that this no longer seems to be the case - as additionally evidenced last autumn when the federal conference voted against holding mulitinationals to ILO standards in the employment of some of the most vulnerable people on this planet.

You may argue that you agree with all that I have said, but that the core of your argument is about subsidiarity. However, given that Britain is widely seen as a low wage, low regulated economy, is it little surprise that other EU states might want our opt-out to be ended given the unfair competitive advantage this gives to our corporate shareholders over those in other countries in what is meant to be a single market? What happened to our long trumpeted call on the Major Government to sign up to the Social Chapter with all the labour protection that envisaged? Was it our policy to sign up as long as we could opt out? I don't remember it being so and I fail to see what has changed.

I implore you and the other MEPs to revise your view on this and similar employment protection measures. Seeking to protect our people from the demands of employers who in most cases have as their sole objective profit maximisation is well within the long traditions of both liberalism and social democracy. It is also one, given that most people are employees, which would not be electorally damaging as long as you do not portray this as something which limits people's ability to act for themselves, which in all truth it is not.

I must stress I write as  a Personnel & Training Manager who has worked in the residential care industry for 15 years now. I do not find complying with these regulations, including the end of the opt-out, as a difficulty and any company that did struggle with them would quite frankly be one which was not functioning effectively at all.

I hope to hear from you.

Friday, 20 May 2005, 10:53

Chris Davies MEP  wrote:

As am MP in 1996 I introduced a Bill in to the House of Commons calling for greater employee protection within the UK.

My reason for supporting the British opt-out of the EU Working Time Directive is entirely on subsidiarity grounds.

If people want strict controls over working hours at the risk of loss of competivity then they should vote for Government to introduce it. I do not believe that measures of this kind should be set as EU standard.

It would be hard to find a more pro-European politician than myself, but if Liberal Democrats do not respect our own belief that decisions should always be taken at the lowest practicable level then we will have no hope in convincing others of the merits of the European case.

The Working Time Directive was introduced using the Health and Safety legal basis. We have supported its application where this is relevant (lorry drivers, doctors etc) but it's application in other instances is I believe illegitimate.

Yours Sincerely

Chris Davies MEP.