Rebuilding after recession: a plan for jobs

The UK labour market is already marked by persistent inequalities that leave those with protected characteristics, including women, BME groups, disabled people and LGBT+ people facing structural discrimination. To take just some examples:

• Black workers, women and disabled workers are all overrepresented in insecure work, with 1 in 24 BME workers on zero-hours contracts, compared to 1 in 42 white workers. [1]
• These groups also face persistent pay gaps: the gender pay gap remains stubbornly high at 17 per cent, and disabled workers still face a pay gap of over 15 per cent. [2]
• Discrimination still forces groups facing protected characteristics into more difficult and dangerous roles. 54,000 women a year are, for example, forced out of work due to pregnancy and maternity discrimination. [3] Our report ‘Is Racism Real’ revealed that despite experiencing high levels of discrimination, BME staff do not feel confident in reporting racism at work, with almost half not reporting incidents [4] .
• Harassment in the workplace often marks the experience of groups with protected characteristics; TUC research found that seven in ten LGBT people had experienced some form of sexual harassment at work, [5] alongside over half of all women. [6]

Previous recessions have often served to exacerbate these inequalities, with those in low paid insecure roles being first to lose work, and structural discrimination holding back their chances of finding a new job. BME groups faced higher unemployment in the 2008-09 recession, and still high unemployment rates. Research shows that during upturns disabled people are the last to gain employment, and during downturns they are first to be made unemployed. [7]

Evidence to date suggests that people with protected characteristics are already facing disproportionate impacts from the pandemic and the economic downturn. In particular, the scale of structural and institutional inequality faced by BME workers has been evidenced by the excessive number of coronavirus deaths they have experienced. The unequal responsibility for unpaid care has also been starkly revealed by the crisis, with women far more likely than men to have taken on additional caring responsibilities and to have seen their employment prospects plummet as a result. Government must recognise the scale of inequality that the pandemic has revealed and act now to prevent both the pandemic and the government policy response from holding back the urgent steps needed to address inequality pr it, and ensure that progress on equality doesn’t go into reverse.

Policy decisions taken now will affect workers for years to come. Over the course of the pandemic we have seen that different groups have been affected both by coronavirus and the policies designed to combat it. The public sector equality duty was specifically introduced to ensure that proper consideration was given to the impact of policies on people from groups protected by the Equality Act. Currently we can see little evidence of how, or indeed if, government is delivering on this duty in its coronavirus response. The EHRC as the relevant regulatory body has a key role to play in ensuring compliance in this regard and must prioritise and appropriately resource enforcement and compliance work in this area.

Step up efforts to tackle inequality across the labour market

Before the outbreak of coronavirus, government had identified several policy areas where it had indicated that issues relevant to groups with protected characteristics would be progressed. These included:

• Taking steps to make flexible working the default
• Measures to strengthen protections around sexual harassment at work
• Reviewing the impact of gender pay gap reporting regulations
• The introduction of ethnicity pay gap reporting measures
• Addressing the disability employment and pay gaps
• Setting up a pregnancy and maternity taskforce
• Reforming the Gender Recognition Act to ensure that trans people do not have to endure a lengthy, humiliating, and expensive process to change their gender, while maintaining the Equality Act 2010 as it stands
• Improving carers leave
• Strengthening redundancy protections for new mothers

Work on these and other policy areas aimed at promoting the rights of people with protected characteristics must form a key part of recovery plans. Work to eliminate discrimination from UK workplaces and promote equality of opportunity is not a ‘nice to have’ additional extra which can be easily shelved when times are challenging. Not only does the government have a legal duty to pay due regard to equality considerations in its decision-making, including decisions to halt or postpone work, but evidence points to the fact that protecting workers and promoting equality brings economic benefits.

For example, the McGregor-Smith review estimated that the potential benefit to the UK economy from full representation of BME individuals across the labour market, through improved participation and progression, to be £24 billion a year, which represents 1.3% of GDP. [8] Reducing gender gaps in labour market participation, Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) qualifications and wages, could increase the size of the UK economy by around 2% or £55 billion by 2030 [9] .

We cannot allow work to promote more equal workplaces and tackle inequality to be labelled as a ‘burden on business’ or ‘red tape’ and deprioritised.

And in many areas government will need to go further than the plans already set out. This is particularly the case if meaningful progress is to be made on race equality at work.

• The persistent inequalities and disadvantages faced by BME people require more than warm words and an additional inquiry to be addressed. Government must set out a funded action plan on race inequality, with clear targets and a timetable for delivery, setting out the steps that they will take to tackle the entrenched disadvantage and discrimination faced by BME people. In order to ensure appropriate transparency and scrutiny of delivery against these targets we recommend that regular updates are published and reported to Parliament.
• The Race Disparity Unit should be given a strengthened role to support delivery of this plan.
• Government must step up measures to tackle insecure work that particularly affects women and BME groups, starting by a ban on zero hours contracts.

Ensure the crisis does not force people with protected characteristics out of work

Those with protected characteristics face particular challenges in the current context. In addition to the fact that people facing discrimination are already more likely to be in low paid and insecure roles that may be cut first, the disproportionate impact of the crisis in the childcare sector on women, and the requirement for some disabled people to shield pose additional risks for women and disabled people.

Address the childcare crisis to protect women’s jobs

As part of national social distancing measures to limit the spread of coronavirus, the government has taken necessary steps to limit the numbers of children and young people attending educational and childcare settings. From 23 March, education and childcare settings were only been open to priority groups (children of critical workers and vulnerable children) and since early June the re-opening of education settings has been limited.

While necessary, this action created huge disruption as working parents suddenly needed to provide at least six additional hours childcare per day, and in many cases far more. Without adequate rights and protections to help working parents balance these new pressures, decades of progress on gender equality at work could be damaged and women’s immediate and long-term access to decent jobs weakened.

Government must:

• Enable mums and dads to balance work and care: Give staff the right to work as flexibly as possible from their first day in the job. Flexible working can take lots of different forms, including the right to predictable hours, working from home, job-sharing, compressed hours and term-time working
• Prevent a large-scale collapse of the childcare sector: Give an urgent cash injection to the childcare sector to ensure it remains sustainable and target additional funding at provision supporting children from low income households
• Ensure our parental leave is fit for purpose: Give all workers, regardless of their employment status, a day one right to 10 days paid parental leave. This could be used, for example, to cover parents who are unable to work during a 14-day self-isolation mandated by NHS Track and Trace, or in local lockdown scenarios.
• Ensure employers are given clear messages from government: Employers will be breaking the law if they unfairly select women for redundancy because of caring responsibilities

Protect those who cannot work through an extension of the Job Retention Scheme

As we set out above, even in businesses that are up and running, there are likely to be some workers who cannot safely work outside the home, including those who are shielding, caring for someone shielding, some who are in vulnerable groups and those whose caring responsibilities mean they cannot work outside the home.

Without action, this risks particularly affecting women and disabled workers, further exacerbating labour market inequality.

• A form of furlough scheme enabling their jobs to be protected should remain in place beyond October.

Additional steps may be required to ensure that disabled workers can work safely as social distancing measures remain in place.

• Government should fund a one-off boost to the Access to Work scheme to ensure more disabled workers are enabled to work safely at home.

Ensure that employment support measures progress equality

TUC research shows that young women are the group most likely to work in a sector at risk of job loss. And the concentration of Black workers, women and disabled people in low paid and insecure jobs means they likely to face a heightened risk of unemployment. Measures to support people into work must be designed to promote equality. This means:

• Ensuring that jobs offered through the Jobs Guarantee can be offered part time, and signpost employers to Access to Work support where needed.
• Regular (at least quarterly) monitoring of outcomes across all employment support and training programmes to ensure that they are meeting the needs of those with protected characteristics and that they have fair and proportionate access to support.