New equality law: Introduction
Section one of the Personnel Today Management Resources one stop guide to new equality laws. Other sections.
Understand why we need new equality laws Examine what makes a strong equal opportunities policy Realise the differences between 'equality'
and 'diversity' |
Equality in the workplace simply makes good sense
Nevertheless, ensuring equal employment opportunities are available and offered to all isn't easy. Mistakes are all too easy for even the best-intentioned employers to make.
Existing and upcoming legislation on ending discrimination in the workplace is intended to expand the employment and vocational training opportunities available to people who may have previously experienced discrimination, and to prevent future generations from experiencing it. It is also intended to make workplaces healthier, happier and more productive environments for all.
This guide covers recent and future UK anti-discrimination legislation on disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation and age resulting from the Employment Framework Directive 2000/78/EC. The Directive makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religious belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. UK legislation on racial discrimination is contained in the Race Relations Act 1976 and the RRA (Amendment) Regulations 2003.
The UK's Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003 and the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003 came into force on 1 and 2 December 2003 respectively.
In terms of disability discrimination legislation, the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 (Amendment) Regulations 2003 took effect from 1 October 2004. Age discrimination in employment and vocational training will become unlawful on 1 October 2006.
The basic premise of these separate strands of legislation is similar, with regards to discrimination against individual situations each represents. But there are subtle differences between them that can be confusing.
Even before this most recent clutch of legislation, a University of Cambridge study in 2000 concluded: "The statutes are written in a language and style that renders them largely inaccessible to those whose actions they are intended to influence. Human resource managers, trade union officials, officers of public authorities and those who represent victims of discrimination find difficulty in picking their way through it."
An additional complication in the UK is that there is no single cohesive body representing equality interests across the board. The government has announced plans to create a single equality and human rights commission, which will then be tasked to develop a single equality act. (See Section 6 on the Single Equality Act) Nevertheless, the creation of both will take time.
Until then, employers must grapple with separate legislation. Keep in mind, however, that the best ways to prevent discrimination from occurring and discrimination claims are treating job applicants and employees fairly and with sensitivity, and recruiting and promoting according to job performance and potential.
Benefits
Why put the regulations into effect at your business? First of all, it's the law. But there are many other good reasons for working to ensure your workforce reflects different segments of local society. They include:
Remedies and penalties
Discrimination can be expensive. In Discrimination remedies and penalties, online HR information source XpertHR points out a number of remedies and penalties that employment tribunals can hand down in cases where discrimination is found to have occurred.
Non-compensatory awards are rare, but employment tribunals have the option to issue the following:
Financial compensation can involve:
And then there is the cost to your organisation's reputation and the impact on morale that even one discrimination claim can cause.
An equal opportunities policy
The first step to creating a discrimination-free zone at your company is to have and enforce a strong equal opportunities policy that is well known and understood by your employees.
The sections of this guide on the different legislative strands will advise you on specific areas of focus. However, here are some fundamental elements to consider when you are developing and implementing your company equal opportunities policy:
(See box below for an example of a basic equal opportunities policy that can be modified and adapted for your company.)
Monitoring
It is not a legal requirement to monitor the distribution of ages, disabilities, religions or beliefs, and sexual orientation throughout your workforce for equality or diversity purposes - but it is highly recommended and considered good practice.
Why monitor?
What you need to do if you monitor:
Awareness raising
To signal the seriousness of its intent on the religion/belief and sexual orientation measures, the Department of Trade and Industry in November 2004 announced £1.4m worth of cash awards to organisations throughout the UK to inform businesses and individuals about their rights and responsibilities under the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation and Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.
One of the largest awards, £250,000, went to the Muslim Council of Britain for a wide-ranging programme of awareness-raising activities.
Being aware of which projects have been initiated by which organisations will help you locate specific training and education programmes to better understand issues facing individual groups within the religion/belief or sexual orientation spectrum.
Projects with the broadest reach throughout the UK include:
Age - the X factor
The precise points and language of the forthcoming age discrimination legislation are not yet known, and the publication of draft regulations, expected in 2004, has been delayed until 2005 - a concern for many employers given the impact it is likely to have on their organisations.
Writing in Employers' Law (see EFA calls on Government to set up equality advice body), Sam Mercer, director of the UK's Employers Forum on Age, suggests that the UK should look to Ireland for the shape of things to come in terms of the impact age discrimination law could have on the workplace. In one Irish case, the low-cost airline Ryanair ran into trouble when it advertised for a "young, dynamic professional". The company defended itself at a tribunal by saying that 'young' meant 'young at heart', but evidence submitted showed that none of 28 candidates who applied for the job were over 40 and that the company's interview and selection procedures were not consistent with its equal opportunities policy.
In another case in Ireland, a civil servant won €40, 000 compensation when he was able to prove that he had been discriminated against in two applications for promotion because he was over 50. He produced figures to prove that no candidate over 50 was successful in applying for certain high-level positions during a four-year period.
"There is a great deal we can learn from Ireland," Mercer wrote in Employers' Law. "First, even if it is found that discrimination has not taken place, employers will have to use significant resources to successfully defend a claim. Secondly, recruitment and promotion will be popular areas for claims - specifically internal recruitment where individuals have knowledge of a company's culture and are likely to be more confident; and finally employment procedures need to be transparent and should be backed up by records."
While UK employers wait to see what the draft regulations will say, a wide-ranging field of research is under way into the habits and aspirations of older workers, which will give employers greater insight into better utilising existing employees and job applicants at the more seasoned end of the spectrum when the legislation takes effect.
For instance, the Centre for Research into the Older Workforce (CROW) is exploring ways of enabling older people to make a more active contribution to the economy. CROW, a partnership between the University of Surrey, the National Institute for Continuing Education (NIACE) and the Pre-Retirement Association, with core funding from the South East England Development Agency, is focusing its research on three main areas:
Already, CROW's research to date offers employers insight into trends and issues they should be aware of as the emphasis increases on keeping people in the workforce longer than before. Any policy initiatives aimed at increasing workforce participation by older workers will have to forgo the stereotypes and take into account very different experiences and aspirations of the qualified and the unqualified. Also, the research shows that the extent to which people feel in control of their working lives affects their attitudes to work and willingness to stay in work longer.
In addition, CROW has found what it says appears to be "a serious mismatch" between the numbers of people who increase their skills and responsibility with job change, and the numbers who receive support. "It is probably that training at this point would be particularly effective at raising skill levels, and that greater investment here would be productive," says the CROW study, Changing Work in Later Life: A study of job transitions.
What is clear is that the legislation will have to reflect major cultural issues as well as legal ones: in short the expectations of the "baby boomer" generation (born between 1945 and 1964), as pointed out in the report The New Old: Why the baby boomers won't be pensioned off by independent think-tank Demos.
"The baby boomers have transformed every station they have passed through and show no sign of stopping in old age," the report says. "As a result, we must confront the conceptual framework we use to think about ageing and the conventional wisdom about the central political or governance challenge it poses.
"Conceptually," it continues, "we need to focus less on abstract demographic trends and look in much closer detail at the underlying social, cultural and attitudinal characteristics of the baby boomer generation."
Another Demos report, Eternal Youth: How the baby boomers are having their time again, attributes the belief that old age begins at 65 to the post-war origins of the modern welfare state and "society's calculations at that time about when it could afford to have us retire." It says that many baby boomers interviewed for the report believe that "old age begins at 80, a full 15 years beyond our traditional state pension age".
The results of a March 2003 report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) called Age, pensions and retirement: Attitudes and expectations also confirm that people are not clinging to stereotypical views about ageing and work - 60 per cent of the 599 respondents to a telephone survey of working and retired people believed that skills and personality, not age, were the critical factors in a person's ability to do a good job. Two-thirds of the respondents said they believed there should not be a mandatory retirement age.
Reasonable accommodation
For disabled workers and, ultimately, some older employees, employers will need to implement physical changes in the workplace in terms of 'reasonable accommodations' along with providing fair treatment in hiring, promotion and the other points of the employment cycle.
Part of the answer will be in 'inclusive design', a school of thought in which products and environments are created for "everyone, regardless of age, gender or circumstance by working with users to remove barriers in the social, technical, political and economic processes underpinning building and design".
According to the University of Salford's Built and Human Environment Research Institute's SURFACE research team, barriers to inclusion can be:
SURFACE suggests employers may want to undertake an access audit for an analysis of a structure or environment for access needs to ensure the environment is more inclusive and enjoyable for all people to use. Some of the points that an access would take into account would be the approach to the site, entrances, horizontal and vertical circulation, acoustic qualities, colour schemes, information systems, how the venue is used and how well it fulfils the function, as well as disability equality training for staff.
Inclusive design, SURFACE emphasises, is not a 'one size fits all' solution bank, and 'bolt-on afterthoughts' are not part of the process.
Conclusion
Finally, it is necessary to keep in mind the differences between the terms 'equality' and 'diversity'. Although often used interchangeably, there are distinct differences between the two, as the European Social Fund-financed Equal programme underscores:
A
recent Audit Commission report says: "Equality is not a minority issue: it is
important for everyone and directly affects the majority of the population.
Women represent more than 51 per cent of the population, disabled people around
14 per cent, and black and minority ethnic communities more than 7 per cent. As
the population becomes increasingly diverse, the need to address diversity and
equality will become greater."
NHS appoints equality and human rights director The National Health Service offers a recent example of how it intends to try to match workforce with its customer base and ultimately solve a number of severe health issues and inequalities for its users. In October 2004, the NHS appointed an equality and human rights director to tackle discrimination in health and social care services. In leading the NHS diversity agenda, Surinder Sharma's mission will be to both bring in more racial minorities to fill high-level roles and to address health inequities ranging from high suicide rates to perinatal mortality among the health services' non-white consumers. In announcing Sharma's appointment, NHS chief
executive Sir Nigel Crisp said: "The NHS workforce must reflect the community
it serves. It must be trained and equipped to deliver responsive and accessible
services for all. Equality and diversity need to be explicitly acknowledged and
integral to all NHS corporate strategies." |
Single Equality
Act
Source: Keep It Simple - The case for a new Equality Act, Justice, National AIDS Trust and Equality and Diversity Forum |
How should your equal opportunities policy read? An example could be: "(This Company) is an equal opportunities employer. This means the company will make every reasonable effort to ensure there is no discrimination or harassment on the grounds of colour, race, nationality, religion, belief, ethnic origin, disability, age, gender or marital status or sexual orientation in the way that the Company treats its employees, contractors, job applicants and visitors. "In issuing this policy, the company has three main objectives:
"The Company is committed to a working environment that offers equal treatment and equal opportunities for all its employees, so that every employee is able to progress to their true potential. "This policy applies to all aspects of the company's working practices and therefore applies to the recruitment and selection of employees, terms and conditions of employment, training, salary, work allocation, promotion and disciplinary procedures. "The company's recruitment, selection and promotion procedures and general policies and practices will be periodically reviewed to ensure this equal opportunities policy is being implemented. "All employees are required to follow and implement the company's equal opportunities policy and to undergo any training and development activities to ensure they can carry out their duties and responsibilities in terms of promoting, developing, implementing and reviewing the policy arrangements in the course of their work. Failure to do so may lead to disciplinary action - possibly including dismissal." Source: XpertHR, Avoiding discrimination - policies and
monitoring |
Section 1: Introduction
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