Checking for discrimination in selection

There are many situations, from recruitment to promotion to redundancies, where employers make selections between people. You often hear people talking about the importance of doing "Equality Impact Assessments" and checking for discrimination, but I've always struggled to get guidance on how to actually do this.

Professional statistician Nancy Carpenter has worked with me to produce a guide to checking for discrimination in selection. It covers everything from how to get hold of data through to how to present it to your employer. I'm aware of several cases where analysis similar to what we describe has worried employers enough that jobs have been saved. I'd be interested to hear experiences from other activists.

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Performance Appraisals, Forced Ranking, Stacked Ranking

When UNITE reps in the IT Services industry were creating our Charter for Fair Pay, one of the issues identified was "forced ranking" - the practice of some companies and managers of pre-determining the proportions of people to receive each score in a performance appraisal system.

There is a mass of evidence about how unfair, discriminatory and counter-productive forced ranking systems are.  There's an interesting article by a management consultant here blaming a variant of this system for Microsoft's poor culture and declining financial performance.  Useful ammunition for union members seeking to oppose the introduction of forced ranking or throw it out where it's already used.

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Redundancy selection ruling - LIFO and age discrimination

For a number of years, many employers who couldn't care less about equality have used it as an argument to attack long-standing redundancy agreements.

Traditionally, unions pushed for any redundancy selection (if we couldn't stop compulsory redundancies in the first place) to be on a "Last In, First Out" (LIFO) basis. The arguments for this were firstly that it was objective and prevented management picking and choosing who they wanted to get rid of (often undermining union organisation in the process), and secondly that the longer you work somewhere the more you build your life around that job so the more impact redundancy would have on you. Sadly, the age discrimination practiced by many employers also means it is often harder for older workers to find other employment.

There can sometimes be some genuine equality problems with LIFO, for example where the composition of the workforce has changed significantly over time, and LIFO could result in a much higher proportion of one group being picked than another. This has often been addressed by making LIFO one of a "basket" of criteria.

UNITE has just won a case at the High Court to protect the use of LIFO in redundancy selection against a challenge from Rolls Royce based on the age discrimination legislation.

In a lot of the debates about the age discrimination legislation, employers do seem to lose sight of the fact that the intention of the legislation was to protect workers from discrimination, not to undermine the rights of all workers.

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Age Discrimination & Minimum Wage

It is a ridiculous and unjustifiable anomaly that we now have legislation against age discrimination, but still a minimum wage set at a lower rate for young people. If young people are doing the same work, why shouldn't they get the same pay?

The argument that it would discourage employers from taking on young people is increasingly tenuous, when a key concern of many employers is the demographic changes meaning there are fewer young people leaving education and entering the workforce, forcing them to look more seriously at employing older people or those who would previously have been excluded from the workforce.

Good to see the TGWU section of UNITE lobbying for a better minimum wage, but what a shame this protest didn't have a higher profile.

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