Trevor Phillips: TUC Black Workers Conference

EHRC Chair Trevor Philips will address  the annual  TUC Black Workers Conference today.

Black and Asian workers are almost twice as likely to be out of work as white workers, and public sector spending cuts could see large numbers of those employed lose their jobs.

The conference debates the major issues facing black workers in the labour market. It is attended by delegations sent by trade unions affiliated to the TUC.

The following  is Trevor Philips’ full ‘The State of Equality’ TUC Black Workers Conference speech:-
 
Trade unions have a long and proud history in advancing equality: from equal pay to disability discrimination you and your affiliates have campaigned successfully against discrimination at work, and in society more generally. This effort has been central to the equalities journey.   A journey which is, by no means, over; and the road may be a little bumpy in the next year or so, as we adapt to the challenges and opportunities of our new economic and political landscape.
 
Today, I want to explore with you what building on those achievements might mean in practice. But on the basis that as the poet George Santayana said " those who cannot remember their past are doomed to repeat it" I want to start with a word about our history.
 
Next week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Brixton riots, or if you prefer, the uprising. Earlier that year we had seen the ghastly death of thirteen black teenagers in the Deptford Fire by the police. Fifteen thousand black people had marched on Fleet Street in early March to protest the police's casual dismissal of what looked to us like a racist attack. Perhaps even more hurtfully, the establishment had reacted with horror and sympathy to the death of a group of Irish teenagers in a nightclub fire the previous year, including with a message sent by the Queen to the Irish government. Yet no-one who mattered seemed to care about the families of those who had died at Deptford. Some of you may recall the slogan of the time : "Thirteen dead and Nothing Said".
 
All this was coupled with the skyrocketing levels of youth unemployment, and blatant discrimination in recruitment - with which Trades Unions at the time still colluded. It was a dangerous cocktail of fury and despair. And inevitably it exploded.
 
My team was one of the few to investigate the fire; we covered the black people's march; and the whole of summer 1981 for me, in my first year as a journalist, turned out to be a constant race to tell the truth of what was happening on the streets.
 
In Bristol yesterday, I was reminded, of an even earlier moment in our history. Paul Stephenson, who many of you will know as the veteran campaigner for racial justice who today chairs the Bristol Legacy Commission, had invited me to present some of the findings of our Triennial Review. Few people now remember that it was Paul who led the Bristol bus boycott in 1963; and that it was his refusal to leave a bar that refused to serve "coloureds that was the inspiration for the very first anti-discrimination laws in 1965 and 1968. Let's remember that it was trades unions who said that women would be afraid to travel on the buses with black drivers, either as passengers or conductors. The boycott went on for weeks; but and I was reminded yesterday, on the very day that Martin Luther King spoke of his dream in Washington DC, the Bristol bus company capitulated and agreed to hire black staff.
 
What a distance we've come. And what a distance unions have come - and today's conference is a potent symbol of that change.
 
For my generation these turned out to be life-changing moments; none of us would be where we are today without those events and those people. In the last thirty years, we've achieved real reductions in the levels of overt and everyday discrimination that were common a generation ago.
 
The routine racism of the past looks outlandish and indecent to our children. The stereotyping of the 1960s and 70s seems just embarrassing.
 
That does not mean it's all over; in fact as I want to say today; the victories over the crass and overt bigotry of yesterday has in some ways merely served to reveal the subtlety and sophistication of much of today's racism and discrimination.
Our task as equality warriors is in many respects just as taxing as that of our predecessors. But I think that we can learn from them; not least by recognising that they kept their eyes fixed on the prize - the prize of real change, of true equality.
 
We start to some extent with the advantage our parents bequeathed us. I referred a moment ago to the first anti-discrimination laws of 1965 and 1968; they were focused on race and were the template for all other equality laws that followed; that is why, whatever we sometimes feel , race equality remains the symbolic touchstone of progress in the UK. But that hasn't come about by accident; it is the result of five decades of struggle, of persuasion and of sacrifice by many. That is why we have the most progressive race equality laws anywhere in the world - and why, whatever the noise in the right-wing media it is impossible for any government to roll it back completely.
 
In politics too, there is agreement amongst the three major parties that we do need a legal basis for the fight against unfairness and discrimination; the principle of equality has now risen above the left-right divide. And whilst that doesn't mean the game is over that's where I want to start when we talk about the future.
 
Equality Act 2010
 
The political consensus embodied in the 2010 Equality Act has created a new, rational and scientific approach to promoting change. That's good. But it's not yet immune from interference. The coalition has this month pressed the pause button on a number of provisions - for example, new rights as they apply to micro businesses and start-ups, diversity reporting by political parties, and the prohibition on age discrimination in services and public functions; and plans to repeal the third party harassment provisions - which holds employers liable for abuse directed at their employees by customers and other staff - the so-called Bernard Manning clause that protects waiters from so-called jokes by racist and sexist comedians.
 
The “red tape challenge” that the government announced yesterday suggests there may be further tinkering ahead. The Commission supports the idea of reducing the bureaucratic burden on both the public and private sectors. But one person’s piece of red tape is another person’s last line of defence from the worst forms of inequality and discrimination.
 
Collectively, we fought for many of the progressive provisions in the Act, which streamlined and simplified the legislation that went before it. Some of them have not been given a chance at all to deliver progress; others, like third party harassment, have and there is no evidence to suggest they aren’t working as intended. The argument now seems to be not whether we need the 2010 Act, but how much of it we keep, and how we make progress with what we've got.
 
The fact is that we should be focusing on how we make progress in a time of demographic change: - a more diverse, older population with more people who identify themselves as disabled and with more women in the workforce. When we started on this journey forty years ago, the default image of the worker was white, male, non-disabled and under forty-five. In the next few years we know that fewer than one in five workers will fit that description. Who will fill the two million private sector jobs that Mr Osborne and Mr able are promising if not them?
 
So my first message is that there is both a need and an opportunity here. Things have changed. Britain has changed. And that means that the equalities business has to understand that change, and to get ready for it. If we simply continue to fight battles we won yesterday we don't just waste our energies - we betray our successors by not addressing tomorrow's challenge. Today's equality warriors need to fight, yes; but they also need to win.
 
The Challenges: Triennial Review
 
To do so we need strategy. We need to know, objectively and scientifically, where we should focus our efforts. That is why six months ago, the Commission published “How Fair is Britain?” the Commission’s first Triennial Review. We found to start with that public attitudes have become much more tolerant of diversity, and much less tolerant of discrimination. But the fact that attitudes in general have changed shouldn't lead us to adopt the complacency that some of the equality agenda's critics are inviting. That would be literally fatal for many in our society.

As a regulator – we work from evidence. And our Triennial Review was all about building the equality evidence base. Going back to first principles: we must be able to measure what things are like, before we can measure the impact of our action.
 
Although the Review doesn’t always give a complete picture, it does reveal some stark disadvantages and some surprising facts - some of which were disturbing of our prejudices:

·   It reminded us of some familiar problems – the ethnic employment gap remains, and even those ethnic groups thought to be doing well, pay a penalty for the offence of working whilst not white - Chinese men earning 11% less than their similarly qualified white counterparts, Indian men 13%;
 
·   And, whilst it may seem trivial, the fact that a quarter of Pakistani men work, in essence, as taxi drivers suggests that an entire community is locked into a way of life that undermines any attempt to rise.

·   It exposed some new ones too –the fact that Afro-Caribbean women are the most likely to be in work and to be the only breadwinner of the family. Perhaps through necessity, they might be taking 2/3 jobs to keep their families above water;
 
·   I was shocked to find that being black and male was a better indicator of having low numerously skills than being learning disabled;
 
·   And stunned by the fact that black and Pakistani babies are twice as likely to die in their first year as White or Bangladeshi babies.

This sort of information should help us to get a feel for the right way to go forward. Looking at the evidence of what is happening will allow us to direct our energies intelligently.

Our contemporary focus
 
Brendan (Barber) said on Wednesday “for workers, spending cuts, a weak economy and rising joblessness add up to a pretty unpleasant cocktail” and Mervyn King noted back in January that families will see their disposable income eaten up as they “pay the inevitable price” for the financial crisis. They’re both right. But as I've already set out, we know where this got us before. The three factors that will most drive discrimination and disadvantage over the next five years are: how we all – government, business and unions too - manage the economy; the reductions in public spending; and the change in relationship between state and citizen.
 
So how will the Commission respond? How will we contribute to a fair and inclusive recovery, where the pain of cuts and the benefits of growth are shared fairly across Britain’s diverse communities?
 
Well, you could summarise our aim for the next five years as making sure that people do the right thing when we're not in the room.
 
But people need to know that we're outside the door ready to step in to defend the rights of the individual – often the most vulnerable and voiceless - if it looks like they can't or won't do the job themselves.
 
In the best of all worlds the only people that we should be doing the legal mud-wrestling with are what some Americans now call the RBGs - the Really Bad Guys, like the BNP and EDL. The Commission has demonstrated that we’re not shy in coming forward when it comes to the worst offenders; and we stand ready to tackle those who seek to undermine the progress of equality in Britain and the good relations between its diverse communities.
 
We start with a lot of public goodwill towards our mission. But we could squander that goodwill very quickly if we don't do the job well, or if we adopt the wrong tone.
 
Reform
 
One prerequisite for doing our job well is adequate resources, well spent. That is why we started the process - long before the spending review - of reducing our costs and ensuring that our staff have the right skills to deliver more value for less public money. Like everyone else in public service we've taken a hit as a result of the spending review; it’s no bigger than anywhere else, and comes with the same pain as anywhere else.
 
We are restructuring to focus on our contemporary mission. We have already announced that we'll be cutting our overheads substantially; so we have more money left in our smaller pot to spend on ensuring that government and business act according to the highest standards of equality and human rights. And we will do this more efficiently too, for example using "lightning strike" investigations as well as our lengthier and resource intensive formal legal inquiries to root out unfairness and discrimination. In short less money on our own internal bureaucracy, more on getting the job done.
 
What may change is the balance between what we do and what the government does itself. There's no settlement on that issue yet and it may take some months to get there.
 
In particular, we will resist any attempts to remove our good relations mandate. At a time when community relations are under particular strain and threats to cohesion such as the English Defence League are on the rise, we must focus and intensify our efforts, not to abandon them. 
 
What is important now is how we do our job most effectively. And that means focusing on better outcomes, delivered more effectively and efficiently.
 
Public Sector Equality Duty
 
We have already saved the taxpayer tens of millions by removing the requirement for over 40 000 public bodies to produce elaborate equality schemes, which actually allowed people to pretend they were making a difference when all they were actually doing was ticking the boxes.
 
Our challenge now is to ensure that the new public sector equality duty – commenced this week – provides a clear framework for public bodies to comply with their duty to eliminate unlawful discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations across all the equality strands, including age, sexual orientation and religion or belief.
 
The government is revising the regulations that underpin the duty. We support the aim of reducing bureaucracy and we have produced easy to understand guidance to help public bodies to do just that.
 
However, we think it’s crucial to provide public servants with legal certainty about what they must do to comply with the law. Only the government can provide this certainty. Without it, their good intentions may backfire, with red-tape replaced by iron-cladding as public bodies left in a legal vacuum will, understandably, guard against every possible source of challenge.
 
Human Rights
 
I also want to take this opportunity to highlight how we’ll be strengthening our human rights work. It is fair to say that human rights in Britain today do not enjoy a positive image.   We’re the brand manager for human rights, and it is our job to turn this situation around.  We have a major task ahead rewriting the discourse about human rights so it is not just what you read in The Sun or The Daily Mail – and you’re likely to read even more of it now that the coalition has established its Commission on a Bill of Rights.
 
We need to get to grips with attitudes and deal with them at source - finding new ways to relate human rights to people's everyday lives, and stopping them being characterised as the sole province of those who wish to do us bad. That is why we have launched a major programme of work on human rights this year, which will culminate in the publication of our Human Rights Triennial Review. 

Conclusion
 
So these are just some of the ways the Commission is seeking to create a fairer and more open Britain, able to draw on the potential of all of its people. We will not, and should not, attempt to take forward this mission alone.
 
This is the moment, more than ever before, that fairness and equality needs to be at the forefront of policy.
 
The ultimate objective of the equality and human rights movement is balance. It is not about dividing up what are increasingly finite resources among vigorously competitive interest groups, but deciding priorities through debate and democratic argument. It is about genuinely involving people in the decisions that affect their lives.
 
Participation is the means, not just the ends of equality and human rights.  And we would like to work with Trade Unions, giving you the tools and information and building your capacity, especially at local level, to ensure your members can play their part as citizen-regulators.
 
Our primary interest is in outcomes, not process. 
 
So part of our Commission’s leadership role is about drawing on the ideas for innovation discussed at conferences such as this one, which can benefit the wider equality and human rights enterprise. I hope in the months and years to come we in the Commission will come together with you to help build a fairer, stronger Britain for all its citizens.
 
Let me leave you with this picture.
 
A global economy in crisis. Oil prices shooting skywards. Civil war in the Middle East. At home, a Conservative Prime Minister, just one year in, after the longest period of Labour administration ever. A Conservative Chancellor embarking on the most sweeping public expenditure cuts seen in a generation, with a determination to reshape the relationship between the citizen and the state. Trades Unions mounting a massive show of defiance and opposition to cuts. The far right marching in the streets and growth of a vigorous ant-fascist movement. And skyrocketing youth unemployment.
 
Britain 2012?
 
Yes; but also no. The year I'm talking about was 1980. The war was in Lebanon, not Libya. The Prime Minister was Thatcher, not Cameron. The Chancellor was Howe, not Osborne. The far right was the National Front, not the EDL. But pretty much everything else was the same.
 
And on April 2nd 1980, a police raid on the Black-and-White cafe in the St Paul's district of Bristol touched off what was then the worst riot in mainland Britain for a generation. Let me be absolutely clear; I am not prophesying in James Baldwin's words "the fire next time". We are a different country now. But we should never be complacent. We have been here before; and Santayana's words should ring in our ears : "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it".