UNISON the public service union

Site search

Search UNISON

Back to Quick Links

Challenging racism at work

(29/08/08) This autumn will see the union roll out its new training programme, Challenging racism in the workplace, across all 12 regions.

Four years in the making, the ambitious project has been fine-tuned in three regions – North West, West Midlands and Greater London – and is now ready to go out to branches nationwide.

The training, which will be supplemented by a Challenging racism in the workplace tool kit and other materials, will equip branches to negotiate equal opportunities for all members by holding employers to account on race equality legislation.

"The legislation is already in place," said UNISON's national race equality officer Pav Akhtar. "It's up to us as a trade union to understand that legislation, and make sure that we make demands based on it, to achieve equality.

"We need to ensure that race equality is incorporated into our core negotiations with employers. If you like, the law gives our activists the tools and this course is giving them the skills."

The Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) imposes a statutory duty on public authorities to build race equality considerations into all aspects of their service. Importantly, the duty requires authorities to actively fight racism and promote equality, rather than merely react to discrimination. All authorities are obliged to produce a race equality scheme.

However, an Audit Commission report in 2004 suggested that, while most authorities had produced such a scheme, few were monitoring their policies or conducting impact assessments.

UNISON also found that few employers had consulted with branches in order to develop action plans that would make their race equality schemes anything more than 'paper policies'.

The union's response is founded on using the Race Relations Amendment Act as a negotiating tool. The aims of Challenging racism in the workplace are to:

move away from dealing with racism on an individual basis and challenge patterns of discrimination by negotiating collective workplace agreements;

train branch negotiators to identify key issues and ensure that challenging racism becomes a core part of union business for all activists and officers;

ensure that UNISON and employers actively promote and deliver race equality.

The course, which has been developed in two phases in the three pilot regions, is designed to raise awareness of the opportunities presented by the Act, build confidence in negotiating with employers, and guide the development of branch action plans. Topics will include a study of the Act, workforce monitoring, interpreting statistics and presenting arguments.

Mr Akhtar said that the work with the three regions had been invaluable in making the training course "as robust, practical and accessible as possible" and in fine-tuning the tool kit.

And he added: "We want to stress that this training is not just for black members, but all members. The majority of negotiators are white, so it's important that they are part of the branch project teams that attend the courses."

When the course is available nationally, individual branches will be urged to set up a project team, including a lead negotiator, that will work with the regions for a period of one year – attending the two-day training course and follow-up sessions, and overseeing the progress that is made between the branch and the employer.

The tool kit provides numerous tips, guidelines and checklists geared to ensuring that employers deliver on equality. Among them are key questions to ask during negotiations, issues that affect black members in the workplace (and that need to be addressed by collective bargaining) and steps that a branch could take if management fails to comply with its legal duties.

North West region equalities officer Dion Baugh said that Challenging racism in the workplace was, perhaps for the first time, bringing racism into the “mainstream” of branches’ daily work.

"Usually, branches will have a black members' officer who deals with race discrimination cases as and when they come up. This project is trying to involve all activists in the branch.

"And I think it's important for it to be done in this way – to get the branches thinking of it as mainstream work, of challenging racism in the workplace as something we should be doing as a matter of course.

"There has always been an element of race equality work in branch action plans. But this is doing it in a more formal and consistent way."

In the first phase of the pilot project, Ms Baugh's region implemented the new training for five of its branches, chosen because each was experiencing race issues in their workplaces; in the second phase, nine branches were involved.

Drawing on the two-day course, these branch teams learned to negotiate with management around race issues – moving away from dealing with individual cases, toward a collective approach – and started to engage black members in developing solutions to problems.

They also started to monitor their workplaces, in terms of numbers of black staff, the grades they held and related questions, and considered the composition of their branch committees, to see if that reflected the membership. "The idea was that they look at the employer with fresh eyes, but also at themselves," said Ms Baugh.

And she insisted that Challenging racism in the workplace was going to prove "a valuable tool" – not just in fighting for equality, but in organisation and recruitment.

"Branches will be able to go into the workplace and say: 'We know there are race issues, this is what we are doing about them, this is how we are challenging the employer'. It will have a definite impact.

"These are not black issues, these are branch organising and recruitment issues. It's not for black people to challenge racism, it's for everyone."

UNISON has found that the first-phase branches in the pilot are currently lending their experience to those in the second wave: peer-to-peer learning is expected to play a substantial factor in the future success of the project.

Another crucial factor, as shown by the differing experiences of those first branch teams, will be the willingness of the employer.

But Mr Akhtar said that he was encouraged by the number of employers who had actually urged their branches to share the discoveries of the course.

"We know that a number of branches are chomping at the bit. It's also been great to see that there is an appetite in the employers to follow suit. And as a trade union, we are very well placed to guide them."

UNISON is aiming to start the courses rolling nationwide from October.

(InFocus, September)

Bookmark, print, post, feed or send to a friend: