Originally published here.

Employees perform better, carry out their allotted tasks to the required  standard, if they are  more, rather than less satisfied with their general work experience. This includes, inter alia, pay, conditions of service (Charness and Kuhn, 2007),  and some nominal dignity at work (free  from bullying and discrimination;  Hodson  2001).  Our  central  focus  relates  to  the  employment  experience  of  a traditionally  disadvantaged group,  British Black and  Asian Minority  Ethnic  staff  (BAME) in  the public  sector.  Their  ‘disadvantage’  has  been  in  part  due  to  persistent  and  widespread  race discrimination at  work  in the  UK (Dickens 2007). 

One  manifestation of  this  is the  extraordinary existence of a substantial pay gap based on ethnicity (Chowdhury 2016; Lewis and Gunn 2007). Such discrimination has persisted despite over  forty years of legislation and  regulation since  1976 Race Relations Act, and a raft of HRM policy initiatives in this area. Deeply embedded race discrimination requires efforts from the government through legislation, and other parties’ involvement to uproot it (Hoel, 2013). Most measures taken so far tend to be top-down initiatives  based  on  unitarist  ideology  (government  and  CIPD  reports),  which  ignore  the  power imbalance between individual  employees  and  employers (Hyman  1994).

Consequently, the  role  of trade unions has been underplayed and under-researched, although all mainstream UK unions today have  robust  anti-racist and  anti-racism  policies  and  programmes,  BAME  members  remain under-represented at workplace level compared with their proportion in the population (TUC 2014,p3). As a result, the debate inside unions has been narrowly focused on access to work rather than experiences of work (TUC, 2017). The daily reality of racism at work for many British BAME workers has been relatively neglected. We  aim  to  contribute  to  the  debate  in  two  ways  by  examining  BAME  workers’  employment experiences.

First,  we explore  the  mechanism  of perceived  management commitment  to an  equal work environment on the relationship between BAME and their evaluation of pay and job satisfaction, against persistent racism at work.  This will help to address the recruitment challenges faced by the public sector due to relatively low pay (Chynoweth, 2015). Second, we examine the moderating effect of equality-committed trade unionism on perceived management efforts to  maintain an equal work environment through the “shock effect” on managers by trade union activity. This is derived from two important dimensions of trade unions in their relationship with BAME workers: as policy makers and opinion  formers  (Miles  &  Phizacklea  1978;  Fitzgerald  &  Stirling  2004;  TUC  2015a);  and  as representatives in  negotiations  with  employers  (ACAS 2014; Archibong and  Darr 2010).   

It  then expands the debate of trade unions’ position towards their BAME members. In order to do so, we collected 2580 valid responses from 15,000 questionnaires attained from five English local councils.1   In the sections that follow, we reviewed BAME employees in the public sector and the role of trade.                                     

This survey  was funded by UNISON unionism  to ensure  equality  implementation,  this leads  to  our  testable hypotheses.  We  employed Structural Equation Modelling to analyse the data. 

Trade unions as organisations and trade unionists have not been immune from both racial stereotyping and racism. This at one level clearly goes against the origins and purposes of trade unionism itself in their  role  as  the  ‘sword  of  justice’  (Flanders  1970;  Metcalf,  Hansen,  and  Charlwood  2001).  All mainstream UK  unions today  have robust  anti-racist  and  anti-racism  policies  and programmes. 

A recent post  on the UNISON  website asked: “Have you experienced racism at work? It is one of the priorities of UNISON, and other unions, to protect members from discrimination and everyday racism – but still, too many Black workers have been the target of  workplace racism” (20 January 2017). A recent TUC report (2017) started by noting that: “Trade unions have a long history of opposing racism and discrimination in the workplace. In recent years, though, the debate has narrowed to focus only on access to work.

This has obscured the daily reality of racism at work for many BME workers – and has reduced  the focus on stopping it … This report clearly shows that  racial harassment  still goes on in too many workplaces”  (p.3). A recent  CIPD survey as reported  in  People Management (4/12/17) found that ‘BAME employees were twice as likely to say that discrimination holds back their careers’.

Our study provides evidence of such discrimination, but more importantly, illustrates the importance of positive attitudes to union interventions. This also has implications for union workplace strength and ultimately on their collective bargaining powers (Ewing, Hendy and Jones 2016) as it appears to re-assert positive ‘boots on-the-ground’ trade unionism. In this  sense  it can be  as useful  a recruiting and  sustaining mechanism as  strike action (Hodder et al. 2017), but with longer-term and more realistic potential as a permanent basis for union recognition and progression.

Our evidence  shows that even when support for the union is in some sense ‘indirect’ since  it comes through pressure  on  management, and that  this changed management behaviour is what is valued by BAME staff, nonetheless the role of the union is understood as being essential to the process of improved equality management. 

As the UK workforce becomes more diverse and as equality issues become more relevant and are no longer ‘hidden in plain  sight’ (Dawson 2016), so the role for workplace union representatives to be the front line against discrimination in all its forms becomes greater. As the TUC and some unions are aware this is now increasingly urgent as racist voices are being raised with more confidence outside the workplace, and as relatively low pay means that non-pay elements of being at work loom larger in the minds of most staff.

This suggests that BAME sections of unions might well be re-integrated into the mainstream of union concerns as an awareness of the issues, representative training across the board, and tackling management in an uneven power relationship becomes the hallmark of what a trade union is and what it is for.

You can read the complete article here.