Equal opportunities in the workplace

INTRODUCTION

Linda Dicken's Manuflex Plc case study (1993) on the introduction of Equal Opportunities in an electrical engineering company in the English Midlands will provide the empirical basis in our debate on whether strategies around diversity offer a solution to the limits of EO policies and practice.

The new Manuflex managing director approached the University of Warwick proclaiming a firm personal determination to introduce EO and requesting guidance in overcoming the implementation problems as encountered in the objections and questions raised by his senior management team.

Our debate hinges on the premiss that limits exist in EO policies and practices. This paper will attempt to prove the hypothesis that a close affinity exists between the managing director's problems and our accepted limits in the formulated terms of the debate. With the identification of that affinity we aim to throw light into the possible effectiveness of strategies around diversity.

 

PROBLEMS, LIMITS AND STRATEGIES

Manuflex Plc's plant is located in an area with a high than average proportion of people from ethnic minority groups. Inspite of the managing director's

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declared interest in EO, no statistics were available on the ethnic and gender

distribution of the 1,400 workforce. However, direct observation of the workshop and offices revealed full-time white women working as packers and packer-checkers, and Asian women performing unskilled production tasks; white female employees filling most of the clerical posts, with only two women of assumed Asian background in junior positions; and the secretaries were mainly mature women. Except for the recently appointed white female Assistant Personnel Manager, white men are in all middle and senior management positions: technical staff are also men; there is a small male sales team working from home; and, apart from one crafstman and two night security guards of apparently Afro-Caribbean descent, white men do the semi-skilled and skilled tasks on the shop floor, work in the stores and as security staff.

So, the overall scene reveals, at the bottom end, the ethnic minority female as unskilled worker, and an almost exclusively white male managerial staff.

The team from the University of Warwick engaged in assisting Manuflex Plc has a double task in their hands, i.e. to provide a formalised strategy of EO implementation and to develop means of improving awareness and cognitive change, particularly at the higher levels of the organisation. The Production Manager is of the view that the company already has equal opportunities, which is not surprising, as undermining the practices defended by line managers are certain principles which seem to link the organisation's culture and overall corporate strategy (Wood, 1986) and inhibit EO implementation.

There will be, therefore, the need to monitor EO ( Holland, 1988; Jewson & Mason, 1987), and policy effectiveness must be under constant scrutiny

(Jewson & Mason, 1986a; Jenkins & Solomos, 1987; Cockburn, 1989 and 1991; Aitkenhead & Liff, 1991; Liff, 1989) whilst patterns of discrimination persist under the cover of formal equality (Liff, 1995, to appear).

There is one female, white, in a management position, but she may be caught in a situation in which she will be rendered unable to break through to the top (Davison & Cooper, 1992). This is reinforced by the fact that she reports to the Personnel Manager. Whilst line managers are patriarchally elevated as the 'providers', the organisation's 'breadwinners', thus mirroring the gendered domestic division of labour, personnel managers and advisers are equated to the 'unproductive' female welfare and administrative role (Collinson, 1987). This devaluation of the sex-type 'female' role (Legge, 1987) places personnel managers and advisers in a peripheral position with little or no authority (Wood, 1986), in which they join the female in a negative status of disadvantage when trying to 'play the white man' (Webb & Liff, 1988; Liff & Dale, 1994) in a culture supported by a discourse which breeds self-fulfilling stereotypes (Snyder, 1989).

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Any possible resistance and subversive action from the Production Manager and his followers will, therefore, be difficult to control. One of the priorities at Manuflex is a revised system of recruitment and selection, in order to redress the overall balance across the workforce spectrum; but this will hardly remain immune to discrimination inspite of formalisation (Jewson & Mason, 1986b). At present vacancies for manual jobs are usually filled through recommend- ations by existing staff or by placing a notice on the gates of the works. External recruitment for vacancies in general would be an advisable measure and ...

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