TUC Equality Audit 2024
The TUC Anti-Racism Task Force was established by the TUC General Council in 2020 and ran for a two-year cycle. The aim of the Task Force was to run a rapid review on the progress affiliates had made on racial equality and justice since the last race task group, the Stephen Lawrence Task Group which was launched in 2000.
The Task Force is now in its implementation and oversight phase. This is to ensure that the commitments and recommendations of the Task Force are actioned, and we progress these commitments for the next five years. As part of the monitoring of this work specific questions were included in the Audit on unions collective bargaining priorities for race, how they were established and taken forward and what success has been achieved.
33 unions responded to the question on what their collective bargaining priorities were for their Black members. The most commonly mentioned was pay, including career progression, monitoring and closing pay gaps and fighting low pay. Another key area was fair recruitment into the workforce – as the CWU put it: “The agreement and implementation of fair and equal recruitment policies that support BAME workers and reach out to BAME communities.” Other issues mentioned by several unions were combating casualisation, under-representation at senior levels, bullying and harassment, and discrimination in processes including performance appraisals and disciplinaries.
32 unions responded to how these priorities were established. There was a range of different ways that unions gathered this information and most unions had a number of ways they did this, so it is hard to draw conclusions. However, the three most frequently mentioned were via Black members networks or committees or broader equality committees (these were more common for smaller unions), union conferences, and from gathering information directly from members including surveys and case work. Four unions said they analysed employer and union data to inform their priorities for example the RCM said they used “analysis of NHS Workforce Race Equality Data” and three unions said they used the TUC work on race to inform their priorities for example BFAWU said “through our affiliation with the TUC and the executive adopting the trade union anti- racism manifesto."
33 unions responded to the question on what their collective bargaining priorities were for their black members. The most commonly mentioned was pay, including career progression, monitoring and closing pay gaps and fighting low pay.
23 unions provided information on how collective bargaining priorities were taken forward with employers once established. Again, there were different ways unions did this, examples are below.
Many public sector unions said they took priorities forward through employer bodies they sat on for example CSP, RCP, SoR and BDA mentioned the NHS Staff Council Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group and ASLEF the Rail Delivery Group Diversity and Inclusion Board. NASUWT and NAHT also mentioned they highlight issues in their annual submissions to the School Teacher’ Review Body.
Other unions mentioned developing new guidance, training or rep roles to support bargaining, for example NUJ said they had “partnered with tech firm to deliver training for the purpose of upskilling and professional development specifically aimed at underrepresented groups and challenged racism in the workplace.” CSP shared that “all workplace representatives have been trained on a course ‘recognising discrimination in the workplace’ which took a deep dive in equality law, discrimination and the impact on members with protected characteristics” and they had “implemented its first ever equality reps” and now have “60 in workplaces across England, Scotland and Wales.” TSSA shared they had developed “bargaining standards with Investing in ethnicity that will be applied to employers.”
Napo and POA both mentioned they had developed action plans with certain employers.
UCU, shared that along with other HE unions, they had “embedded the demands to tackle equality pay gaps and casualisation within our national HE pay dispute.” And Unite said as part of negotiations they put pressure on employers “to carry out race equality audits particularly around on grievance, disciplinaries, recruitment, selection and promotion” and are “pursuing employers that jump on the bandwagon of equality but do not act accordingly. There are a number of corporate companies exploiting equality campaigns for profit.”
Finally, 18 unions provided examples on bargaining successes they had of specific benefit to Black workers.
The TSSA, for example, won agreement with both Network Rail and TfL to release internal data on ethnicity. It has also negotiated with Network Rail to establish a race matters initiative with TSSA involvement, which the union says has allowed some Black members to “advance through the glass ceiling.”
Unite forced Mitie at Heathrow airport to reintroduce scrapped training and language support for cleaners who do not have English as a first language but who need to pass certain courses to move beyond the lowest paid roles.
In professional-specific areas, Equity negotiated the provision of hair and make- up support for Black artists, and the PFA achieved specific programmes to support developing Black players.
A number of unions, including Unite, EIS and ASLEF, pointed to their success in getting employers to provide specific risk assessments for Black workers during the Covid pandemic.
Some unions’ successes came as a result of efforts to improve pay, terms and conditions that inherently particularly benefited Black workers.
RMT, for example, highlighted its campaigning, including in some cases strike action, to win improved pay and conditions and insourcing of low-paid outsourced cleaning workers, among whom women, Black and migrant workers were disproportionately
represented. These efforts resulted in pay rises for outsourced cleaners at Churchill on the Eurostar contract and the Govia Thameslink Railways stations and trains contracts. It also won travelcards for sub-contracted cleaners working at Transport for London for travel on TfL’s network, which the employer estimates covers 5,800 people.
Similarly, Unite won agreement with Barts NHS Trust to bring back in-house the mainly Black cleaners, porters, security guards, and domestic staff who were previously outsourced and employed by Serco. The agreement, which also followed strike action against inequality and pay disparity between Serco staff, meant they were immediately transferred on to the superior Agenda for Change terms and conditions.
Other responses included successes that unions achieved in ways other than directly through collective bargaining. For example, the NUJ worked to retain roles occupied by Black workers in redundancy situations, while Unite used equality impact assessments to expose the disproportionate impact of job losses on Black members to bring about changes from certain employers.
The NASUWT and NEU pointed to their successful campaign to eliminate the performance-related pay system in schools, which had been shown to inherently discriminate. This resulted in the Department for Education (DfE) agreeing to abolish it, and it has also been scrapped in a number of multi-academy trusts.
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