The Rise of the Equalities Industry
| Title | The Rise of the Equalities Industry |
| Author(s) | Peter Saunders |
| Organisation | CIVITAS |
| Date | November 2011 |
| No. of pages | |
| Key words | youth unemployment; multiple disadvantages; inequality; employment |
| Description | As youth unemployment rises to record levels, a new Civitas report reveals that British workplaces spend up to a billion pounds a year complying with clumsy equality legislation. The costs put particular strain on public sector organisations, as well as making it more difficult for businesses to create and retain jobs. Furthermore, these policies have made jobs less accessible to disadvantaged, marginal workers. |
| Select quotations | “The associated costs of equalities monitoring amount each year to an estimated: - £150 million in the service sector
- £35 million in manufacturing
- £25 million in construction
- £210 million across small and medium-sized businesses
- Between £300 million and £400 million across the whole private sector.”
Examining DEFRA: “At the end of 2010, it was employing 2,570 core staff in its central London office (plus another 6,910 elsewhere). It has its own diversity team in London which in 2009-10 employed 4.5 staff at a cost of £231,000. This team’s work seems mainly to consist of researching the social make-up of DEFRA staff.” “In essence, every statistical deviation from the population average in an organisation is taken as evidence of prejudice. Instead, they are often due to the choices and priorities of employees of different genders and cultural backgrounds.” “The only way to generate the ‘savings’ of £15 to £23 billion that the Equalities Strategy refers to would be to force millions of women to do science rather than arts degrees, to take private sector rather than public sector jobs, to work as software engineers and architects, rather than as teachers and vets, and to put their children in nurseries and crèches even if they prefer to spend time with them at home.” “…gay men and lesbians tend to earn more than heterosexual men and women. Gay men also tend to cluster in particular kinds of occupations, just as women do, but in the case of gays, this clustering is never seen as a ‘problem’ by equalities campaigners.” “Ultimately, ‘equality’ is being redesigned from something in which everyone can expect to share, to a scarce resource that will only be available to groups that are selected to have their voices heard in policy circles.” “Despite the rhetoric, modern equalities discourse is not neutral. It is tied to a wider and deeper political agenda…If this agenda is not opposed with a clearly-articulated alternative conception of fairness rooted in the liberal tradition of equal treatment under a single set of rules, then liberalism itself will eventually crumble and fade away.” |
| Link (Summary) | www.civitas.org.uk/press.prequalitiesindustry.htm |
