The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

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Please note this report includes racist comments shared with us by focus group participants to illustrate their experiences of everyday racism. These may trigger unwelcome and distressing memories or thoughts for some readers. Resources for support can be found at the end of this report. Executive Summary She posed the question to delegates: “Are we yet at a healthier tomorrow and do we have healthier workplaces? Clinical Excellence Award (CEA): Locally a BME consultant makes 24.5% less than a White consultant, compared with national awards which is only 5.4% less.

NHS England, (2020), ‘We Are The NHS. People Plan 2020/21 - Action for all of us’ Available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/We-Are-The-NHS-Action-For-All-Of-Us-FINAL-March-21.pdf ↩ There are important caveats. We know that discrimination occurs, but these experiments cannot be relied upon to provide clarity on the extent that it happens in every day life.

Research methodology – Focus groups and polling

Effort should also be taken to ensure that managers themselves are role-modelling the healthy behaviours they want their staff to exhibit. Dame Carol highlighted a Swiss study that found employees working under managers with no health problems were the healthier than those who worked under managers who had mental and physical health issues.

of workers from the Indian ethnic group were in 'professional' jobs – the highest percentage out of all ethnic groups Ethnicity Facts and Figures, (2021) Employment by ethnicity. Covers England, Scotland and Wales in the year 2019. Source: Annual population survey. Available at: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/employment/employment/latest#by-ethnicity ↩ Ethnicity Facts and Figures, (2021) Unemployment by ethnicity. Covers England, Scotland and Wales in the year 2019. Source: Annual population survey. Available at: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/unemployment-and-economic-inactivity/unemployment/latest#by-ethnicity ↩ The bank has apologised to customers and said it is working to restore mobile and online banking as a “matter of urgency”.The main statistical problem that arises with ethnicity pay reporting is the unreliability of sample sizes. If an employer with 250 employees (the threshold suggested in the 2018 BEIS consultation on ethnic pay gap reporting) [footnote 42] reports a gender pay gap, on average they will be comparing 125 men with 125 women. You would think something like this would take half an hour, maybe two tops to fix, but it’s been ongoing since 8am, which is quite a long time for something like this.” Percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number, so some totals may not add up to 100%. Not included in the data

Reporting an incident to an employer, in the majority of instances, doesn’t lead to action being taken to prevent future hara Research shows this is predominantly due to businesses’ credit and financial characteristics being at odds with the market standard approaches that are used to make credit decisions, when applied equally to all firms. ↩ An ethnicity pay gap is calculated as the difference between the median hourly earnings of the reference group (White or White British) and other ethnic groups as a proportion of median hourly earnings of the reference group. [footnote 41] For this reason, pay gaps, on whatever grounds, do not necessarily represent unequal pay for equal work, but can describe the structure of an organisation and how different ethnic groups are distributed across its pay bands. For example, any employer in the Lake District can expect 98% of its candidate pool to be White. An employer there with 300 staff could then expect to have on average just 6 ethnic minority employees. These processes are challenging to nail down and then to police, given their informal nature, but more broadly, the NHS recognises that there are problematic disparities which impact the experience, wellbeing and health outcomes of staff themselves, as well as their career progression, and the performance of the Trusts in which they work. [footnote 70]I wouldn’t be standing before you today if that were true and I know many people who would say that if you’re not 100% fit, that doesn’t stop you working,” she explained. New ways of working presenting challenges Mehrabi.N, Morsatter. F, et al., (2019), ‘A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning’ Available at: arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09635 ↩

However, Dame Carol noted that society is beginning to realise the challenges that particular groups of workers face. “Gig workers, people who are caring – they all have needs we now recognise and many organisations are doing something about,” she told delegates to the conference. Di Stasio, V., and Heath, A., (2019), ‘Are employers in Britain discriminating against ethnic minorities?’, GEMM Project, available at: http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Are-employers-in-Britain-discriminating-against-ethnic-minorities_final.pdf ↩ Aston University, Coventry University and Manchester Metropolitan University are among the 33 business schools across the UK that have been awarded the Small Business Charter in recognition of their ongoing work to support small businesses, local economies and student entrepreneurship. ↩

Introduction

Discrimination is likely to be a part of the story too, an assumption reinforced by field experiments in which responses are compared in imaginary job applications between people with majority and minority sounding names. We will look at this later in the ‘Bias at work and what to do about it’ section. We didn’t talk about mental health 13 years ago, when I was appointed to lead the review,” Dame Carol said. “It’s taken a long while for us to really get to grips with mental health in the workplace.” In spite of the variations, there have been more signs of social progress than social regress over the past 50 years, with some groups, like those from the Indian and Chinese ethnic groups doing even better than those from the White ethnic group, and other groups catching up.