The King’s Speech included official confirmation of the new Labour government’s plans to introduce a new Race Equality Act which intends to ‘enshrine the full right to equal pay in law’.
While the legislation will focus to a degree on disability – an oft-overlooked protected characteristic in the world of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) – it is its prevailing attention on race and ethnicity which could potentially do more harm than good.
It is firstly worth noting that the UK is already one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to providing anti-discrimination protections on the grounds of race, ethnicity, and religion – certainly more so than major European Union member-states such as France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In terms of ethnic pay gaps in the wider UK labour market, indigenous white British workers are ‘mid-table’ in terms of average hourly pay – with non-white Chinese-origin and Indian-heritage ethnic groups leading the way. In recent times, wage growth has been relatively strong among the traditionally deprived Muslim-majority Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic groups.
There is also the risk of unintended consequences if the new legislation demands that firms must publish ethnic pay gaps among their workforce. An exclusively white-British, rural-based company with workers that have decades-long experience could fall foul of ethnicity pay reporting provisions by bringing on young, talented, ethnic minority people from more urban localities. It would be absurd to suggest that they should be paid similarly to the leadership of the company (which may include those who built it up from scratch). If the legislation is badly designed, it could discourage forms of recruitment that would act as a bridge across race, generation, and geography. Established native workers wouldn’t have the opportunity to pass their entrepreneurial wisdom down to the more diverse generations, while younger workers would not have the chance to bring fresh energetic ideas to the table that those more senior may welcome and benefit from. We all lose out – missing out on potential business and cohesion gains.
There are practical opportunity-focused measures that could be put in place to help improve socio-economic integration outcomes for ethnic and religious minorities. A wealth of field experiments has found that even after controlling for education, work experience, and skill set, CVs with ‘culturally distant’ names tend to fare worse than those with traditional ‘English-sounding’ names in recruitment processes and invitation to interviews. This effect is stronger for applications headed with a ‘Muslim-sounding’ name. To reduce the impact of prejudices and biases in the process, the expanded roll-out of name-blind procedures (where applicants are designated a personal employment number and encouraged to state their nationality/residency status) could provide more British ethnic minority applicants with opportunities to present a positive account of themselves at the interview stage.
But any Labour government which is serious about the UK being a genuine land of opportunity needs to address the bread-and-butter issue of class-based barriers to social mobility. There are left-behind parts of the country which are largely disconnected from the modern British economy. These are communities consisting of young ‘forgotten’ people that need on-the-ground career advice on the qualifications which best fit their aspirations, how to develop the tools to build mainstream professional contacts, and how to navigate the competitiveness of the labour market. Race is not the overriding driver of disadvantage in this context – it is the sheer lack of social infrastructure and civic assets which are geared towards youth personal development.
The Labour government would do well to end its ‘progressive’ cultural obsession with ‘racial disadvantage’ and seek effective solutions to bolster economic opportunities in Britain.
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