VII. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION (AA)/ EMPLOYMENT EQUITY (EE) POLICIES AND PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, SOUTH AFRICA, THE EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES AND NETHERLANDS

Contrasts and Contradictions in Employment Equity Practices in EU Countries

JOHN WRENCH
University of Southern Denmark

Abstract

      This paper looks at the development in EU countries of diversity management, in the context of the employment integration of Europe’s post-war immigrant population and their descendants. The paper suggests some variables of national context that may be relevant to the adoption of diversity management in the EU context, such as the different legal and institutional context, and historically different national conceptions of citizenship, and responses to immigration and ethnic diversity. Finally, the paper asks the question as to whether the nature of the national political discourse on issues such as immigration and multiculturalism can have a direct effect on the adoption or otherwise of diversity management by employers.

      Diversity management is the latest development in a sequence of strategies that have aimed to better represent excluded minorities in employment. It stresses the necessity for recognizing cultural differences between groups of employees and making practical allowances for such differences in organizational policies (Jamieson and O’Mara 1991; Kossek and Lobel 1996; Thomas 1990). European governments are becoming increasingly concerned about issues of the social inclusion and exclusion of immigrants and ethnic minorities within their borders and the important role that integration into employment plays in this. The communities established by postwar labor migrants in western European countries have long been overrepresented in long-term unemployment or in poorly paid, insecure and generally undesirable work. Many people are now seeing diversity management as a tool for promoting employment inclusion of these groups.

      The first question to ask is whether the development of diversity management in Europe will turn out differently from that in the United States. For one thing, the historical and political context of diversity management in Europe is different in many potentially significant ways from that in the United States. For example, there has been nothing like the U.S. experience with affirmative action in Europe and no parallel political movement against it. In the United States the legal and administrative pressure on companies through equal employment opportunities/affirmative action (EEO/AA) provided the context for the development of diversity management. There was also in the United States a body of expertise, a tradition of consultants and a class of management experts and human resource professionals who developed into the diversity advocates and specialists of later times (Kelly and Dobbin 1998). The difference of the EU context is that in most member states, there has been nothing like the US EEO/AA pressure for action, nor has there developed an identifiable management constituency of professionals working with these issues.

      One recent comparative research project raises some questions relevant to the development of diversity management in Europe. This is the ILO initiative “combating discrimination against (im)migrant workers and ethnic minorities in the world of work”, a 7-year research project finished in 1999. One part of this looked at the extent, content and impact of anti-discrimination training and education activities in migrant-receiving countries (Wrench and Taylor 1993). This was carried out in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Finland, Spain and Belgium (see Abell et al. 1997; Castelain-Kinet et al. 1998; Colectivo Ioé 1997; Taylor et al. 1997; Vuori 1997). The aim was to document and evaluate in different countries antidiscrimination training and education activities, where such training is imparted to people who have a part to play in access to the labor market, such as human resource and line managers in both the private and public sectors who are involved in the recruitment process, as well as civil servants and officials in labor exchanges and other agencies that play a placement role for individuals seeking employment, and trade union full-time officials and shop stewards. Whilst the research showed that diversity management was still very much a minority activity, it also produced indications of its growing popularity in two countries, the Netherlands and the U.K. (Wrench, forthcoming).

      The exercise was also carried out in the United States (Bendick et al. 1997), and the American study confirmed that diversity management is much more common in the United States than in Europe. The American researchers compared the distribution of training emphases of the sample of training providers contacted in the United States research with those used in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands research. It is interesting to note that in each of these three countries in the mid-1990s, the majority training emphasis was different. In the Netherlands, the most common activity was Cultural Awareness Training, with nearly half the trainers involved in this. The emphasis of this kind of training was on increasing understanding of different cultural attributes or on training how to manage people from different cultural backgrounds. In the United Kingdom the majority activity was Equalities Training, with nearly 60 percent involved in this. The emphasis of this type was on changing behavior rather than attitudes, and on training the correct skills and practices for operating without discrimination or combating the discriminatory practices of others. In the United States the largest category was Diversity Management Training, with over a third involved in this.

      Drawing on the evidence of the ILO study, we can raise a question in the context of the spread of diversity management in Europe. Will the previous dominant tradition of organizational policies in a national context have implications for the character of diversity management as it develops in that country? For example, does the historically strong Dutch tradition of intercultural management, as reflected in the dominance of Cultural Awareness Training, mean that diversity management in the Netherlands will be stronger on cultural elements and weaker on the combating discrimination elements, compared to the United Kingdom, where the dominance of Equalities Training to combat discriminatory behavior might mean that antidiscrimination elements figure more strongly? In Finland the ILO study revealed an almost complete absence of any antidiscrimination activity in the employment sphere. A conclusion drawn from the report was that “a fundamental prerequisite for further training to be developed is a raising of the awareness of the occurrence of discrimination against migrant and ethnic minority workers--an awareness which is still lacking among many of the labour market gatekeepers interviewed for this research”.¹ Since the Finnish ILO study was completed, the ideas of diversity management are now starting to be discussed in Finland, with a conference on the subject in Helsinki in September 2000. Will the development of diversity management in Finland take on a different form from that in the United States or even in the United Kingdom simply because of the apparently total lack of experience of previous organizational approaches in Finland? More broadly, it can be said that between different parts of Europe, there is a great variation in the levels of awareness of racial discrimination in employment, in the definition of it as a problem issue, and in the experience in organizational policies to combat it (Wrench 1996). Will this have implications for the character of diversity management in these locations?

Culture, Structure and Management

      Other questions suggest themselves on the transferability of the practice of diversity management to Europe. The first concerns issues of culture. There have been many studies on the implications of national culture for management practice (e.g., Hofstede 1991). However, there has been relatively little written so far on the specific implications of national culture for diversity management. There is not the space here to list all of the intra-European differences of culture, history and institutions that might have some relevance to international diversity management, but we can consider just one or two in order to indicate the sorts of factors that might be relevant. An example of a cultural constraint on diversity management might be the “particularism” characteristic of some parts of Europe. A family-based particularism is said to be common in areas such as the south of Italy, Greece and Spain, and is a phenomenon which is “characterised by the elevation of family bonds above all other social loyalties” (Mutti 2000:582). In a society where this carries through into organizational practices, it will have implications for policies targeted to produce a more diverse workforce. For example, trade unions will often have formal or informal agreements with employers that prioritize their own family members for jobs and thereby exclude newcomers. In Nice, in the south of France, there was until recently an agreement between the trade unions and public transport employers that priority for all new jobs on the buses went to the children of existing bus drivers. The bus company began to have problems on the buses with some immigrant young people and decided that the problem might be helped if they were to recruit some people of immigrant background. However, the trade union agreement initially made it difficult for the drivers to accept this new scheme to prioritize the recruitment of people of immigrant background, until eventually a new agreement was made which reserved 50 percent of jobs for the family of drivers, and 50 percent for external recruitment (Wrench 2000).

      If particularism is an example of a potential cultural constraint on diversity management, then a structural constraint might be size of firm. In the United States, it seems that diversity management policies are more developed in the larger companies. In 1998, 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a diversity program. Similarly in Europe, the “frontrunners” seem to be the larger corporations and public sector organizations. However, in some European countries, a much higher proportion of business activity takes place in small-and medium-sized companies compared to the United States or the United Kingdom. Denmark, for example, is a country characterized by relatively small businesses, often without anything like a formal human resource function.

Other Potentially Relevant Differences of European Context

      There are great differences, historically and culturally, in national responses to ethnic diversity within the EU. This is at least partly related to the very different historical approaches to immigration. Different approaches to immigration and ethnic diversity include the “gastarbeiter” approach, where immigrants are seen as guestworkers without full social and political rights (e.g., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium), an “assimilation” approach where immigrants are awarded full rights but are expected to become like everyone else (e.g., France) and a “multicultural” approach where immigrants have full rights but maintain some cultural differences. (Sweden and the United Kingdom have some elements of this; Castles 1995.) Will a diversity management approach only find a sympathetic home where elements of a multicultural approach have been historically more in evidence?

      One difference between the European and American context is that in America, there is an assumption that immigrant populations will eventually become full and equal members of society, and that certainly their children born on American soil will become American citizens. This is not so in some European countries, where citizenship is made difficult to acquire for immigrants of longstanding legal residence and even for their children born in that country. The lack of citizenship rights excludes whole sections of workers from many employment opportunities (Wrench 1996). Legal restrictions on immigrants ensure that large sections of immigrant workers remain complementary to native workers and do not endanger their employment prospects (Gächter 1995).

      In some parts of southern Europe, immigrants operate in an almost separate labor market to the national majority. Migrant workers such as agricultural workers in Spain on temporary contracts are segregated from Spanish workers, doing unpleasant jobs that the locals don’t want to do. The areas where large numbers of immigrants work on temporary contracts were traditionally untouched by equal employment opportunity or antidiscrimination policies and, in such circumstances, diversity management policies are similarly irrelevant. However, the continuance or extension of a “gastarbeiter mentality” into higher-status jobs in the normal labor marker does have implications for diversity management. For example, there is a new German initiative--dubbed Germany’s “green card” scheme--which aims to alleviate its information technology shortages by inviting computer experts from countries such as India to live and work in Germany for up to 5 years. This, according to one commentator “is helping to sustain the old myth that one day, if circumstances change, the foreigners may all go and leave Germany to the Germans. The green card holders are ultimately modern, hi-tech guestworkers” (Guardian October 31, 2000). This does not sit well with the sort of organizational culture that is supposed to be fostered by diversity management--a heterogeneous pluralistic culture where all differences are valued--when sections of ethnically-differentiated workers are marked out in a legally inferior position to their colleagues.

Cultural Imperialism

      Thus, under circumstances of legal inequality, a diversity management approach would seem to be premature. However, even when this is not the case, there are still those who question the easy transfer of diversity management to a European environment on the grounds that the philosophy is grounded in American culture that is not appropriate elsewhere. Writers such as Bourdieu and Wacquant criticise the “cultural imperialism” inherent in the assumption that American academic ideas can be imposed on nonAmerican environments. An example of “cultural imperialism” for Bourdieu and Wacquant is the American imposition of the word minority with all its unstated assumptions and presuppositions that “categories cut out from within a given nation-state on the basis of ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ traits have the desire or the right to demand civic and political recognition as such” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999:46, 51). For some people in France the very word diversity has unacceptable overtones. The American historian Nancy Green, when describing the French discourse on immigration, notes that some French writers see that the United States is no longer the immigration “melting pot” it once claimed to be; they argue that “the United States has renounced its literal melting pot to follow a dangerous path of diversity, which France should in no way copy” (Green 1999: 1199). Green sums up this view thus: “As seen from across the Atlantic, then: the melting pot is dead (in the United States) long live the melting pot (in France)” (1999:1204).

      Consistent with this is the hostility in the French national environment to the recording and monitoring of ethnic origin. It is not only in France where there are problems of this sort. It is difficult to do this in Denmark, and even in the Netherlands, which is a country with one of the strongest records of equal employment opportunity and diversity management practices; there has been in recent years considerable opposition to the practice. There are thus wide variations within Europe with regard to the acceptability of one important component of diversity management practice.

The Political Context of Diversity Management in Europe

      There are important differences in “national myths” that have implications for the acceptability of policies relating to immigrants and ethnic minorities. In countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, which have been built on immigrants, the idea of immigration has been a relatively positive theme in national development. European countries, on the other hand, see their cohesion as coming from nationality or ethnicity rather than the “strength through diversity” associated with traditional immigration countries. It has been noted by others that someone in the United States who would be called a “second-generation American” would be called in most European countries a “second-generation immigrant”. Thus in some European countries, the national political discourse does not provide a sympathetic environment for the adoption of diversity management by employers.

      An example of such an unsympathetic national environment is Denmark. In recent years, “cultural racism”, rooted in ideas that Europeans--or Danesare culturally superior, has become a widespread and deep-rooted aspect of Danish public debate. As Wren (2001:146) writes, cultural racism has found a particularly fertile territory in Denmark, and has indeed become “part of the very fabric of Danish society. . . . Public racist slurs have become commonplace
(and legally tolerated), and political parties across the spectrum have adopted cultural racism as an integral part of their platforms”. Right wing politicians in Denmark play on public fears that foreigners will flood into the country and take advantage of the Danish social welfare system. Mainstream political discourse on the subject of immigrants and refugees has shifted markedly to the right in recent years, and the views of right wing politicians, once considered extreme or racist, are now uttered by “respectable” people in mainstream organizations. In 2000 the (Social Democratic) Minister of the Interior felt the need to forcefully reassure the public that “Denmark will never be a multicultural society”. The November 2001 general election was fought in a climate of anti-immigration rhetoric, with the new successful government promising to “do something about the immigrants”.

      This climate inevitably has an effect on labor market actors. A study conducted on behalf of the Danish Board for Ethnic Equality in 1995 found evidence that many Danish companies would not take on second generation immigrants as trainees who may “irritate customers or colleagues”, “lack the Danish sense of humour”, or “do not understand workplace jargon”. There is also evidence of a lack of tolerance of cultural differences once ethnic minorities are in employment. Hospitals have instructed their Muslim staff not to wear their head covering at work “on grounds of hygiene” (Jyllands-Posten August 6, 1996). During 2000 several stories in Danish newspapers concerned major department stores or supermarket chains where the policy was to refuse to allow Muslim employees to wear the headscarf at work.

      In recent years an extra and paradoxical dimension has been added to this picture. Employers in Denmark are beginning to suffer labor shortages and, in particular, a severe shortage of skilled labor. Yet the negative social climate for immigrants, and the associated discrimination they face, means that highly qualified immigrants and refugees remain unemployed. In 2000, a number of media stories reported that the unemployment record for immigrants in Denmark was the one of the worst in the EU, and that highly qualified immigrants were despairing of ever finding work in Denmark and were moving to other countries to work, thus taking from Denmark skills it cannot afford to lose.

      This climate of negative political discourse means that in Denmark the private labor market seems to be ahead of the public one when it comes to diversity issues. An organization called “Foreningen Nydansker”² was set up in June 1998 by a number of large businesses with the aim of influencing public debate and setting a “positive agenda” in the business community regarding the employment of “new Danes”. However, activists in this organization report that they are “swimming against the tide” in trying to promote more broadly a diversity management consciousness. The director reported that when he meets with employers to discuss with them the possibility of adopting diversity management policies, the employers reply that the government has pronounced that Denmark is not a multicultural society, and that government integration polices will make Danish people out of the immigrants. Therefore, say the employers, why do we need to introduce policies that make allowances for cultural differences when in 5 years there won’t be any? He also reported that those employers who might be sympathetic to taking on more immigrant employees were concerned about customer reaction, and concluded: “As long as the politicians won’t put any demands on the Danes, then companies can’t put any demands on the customers”.³

      In conclusion, there would appear to be many differences between the American and European contexts, and between EU countries themselves, in variables that may have implications for the introduction or operation of diversity management. Within Europe, there are differences such as in the legal context for antidiscrimination or equal opportunities polices, different traditions of organizational equity policies, differences in access to citizenship, differences in political discourse and many other differences in national institutional, cultural and historical context. US practices of diversity management were developed in the context of years of experience in regard to affirmative action and equal employment opportunity policies. European employers are facing some of the same forces that encouraged the adoption of diversity management in the United States, and there is evidence of a spreading interest in the practice of diversity management across EU member states, yet many European countries have virtually no previous experience of any sort of antidiscrimination or equal opportunities policy in organizations. It will be important to observe whether and in what ways rate of adoption of diversity management, and the specific content of practices under that heading, are related to these variables of European national difference.

Acknowledgments

      This paper comes from a broader project on diversity management in Europe financed by the Swedish National Institute for Working Life and coordinated through the program “Work and Culture”, Norrköping.

Endnotes

1. Foreword to the report by M.I. Abella, Vuori 1997 p. vi.

2. The full title is “Foreningen til integration af nydanskere på arbejdsmarkedet”, which means the association for the integration of new Danes (immigrants) into the labor market.

3. Personal interview, Copenhagen 2001.

References

Abell, J.P., A.E. Havelaar, and M.M. Dankoor. 1997. The Documentation and Evaluation of Anti-discrimination Training in the Netherlands. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Bendick, M., M.L. Egan, and S. Lofhjelm. 1998. The Documentation and Evaluation of Anti-discrimination Training in the United States. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Bourdieu, P., and L. Wacquant. 1999. “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” Theory,Culture and Society, Vol. 16, no. 1.

Castelain-Kinet, F., S. Bouquin, H. Delagrange, and T. Denutte. 1998. Pratiques de Formations Antidiscriminatoires en Belgique. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Castles, S. 1995. “How Nation-States Respond to Immigration and Ethnic Diversity.” New Community, Vol. 21, no. 3.

Colectivo Ioé: M. Angel de Prada, C. Pereda, and W. Actis. 1997. Anti-discrimination Training Activities in Spain. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Gächter, A. 1995. “Forced Complementarity: The Attempt to Protect Native Austrian Workers from Immigrants.” New Community, Vol. 21, no. 3.

Green, N. 1999. “Le Melting-Pot: Made in America, Produced in France.” Journal of American History, Vol. 86, no. 3.

Hofstede, G. 1991. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind--Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival. London: Harper Collins.

Jamieson, D., and J. O’Mara. 1991. Managing Workforce 2000: Gaining the Diversity Advantage. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kelly, E., and F. Dobbin. 1998. “How Affirmative Action became Diversity Management.” American Behavioural Scientist, Vol. 47, no. 7 (April).

Kossek, E.E., and S.A. Lobel, eds. 1996. Managing Diversity: Human Resource Strategies for Transforming the Workplace. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mutti, A. 2000. “Particularism and the Modernization Process in Southern Italy.” International Sociology, Vol. 15, no. 4.

Taylor, P., D. Powell, and J. Wrench. 1997. The Evaluation of Anti-discrimination Training Activities in the United Kingdom. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Thomas, R.R., Jr. 1990. “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity.” Harvard Business Review (March/April).

Vuori, K. 1997. Anti-discrimination Training Activities in Finland. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Wren, K. 2001. “Cultural Racism: Something Rotten in the State of Denmark?” Social and Cultural Geography, Vol. 2, no.2.

Wrench, J., and P. Taylor. 1993. A Research Manual on the Evaluation of Anti-Discrimination Training Activities. Geneva: International Labour Office.

Wrench, J. 1996. Preventing Racism at the Workplace: A Report on 16 European Countries.Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.

Wrench, J. 2000. Trade Unions, Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Europe: Report on the Danish National Project. European Social Fund “INTEGRA” Project No. I 1997 DK 508. Unpublished report, Esbjerg: University of Southern Denmark.

Wrench, J. Forthcoming. “Anti-Discrimination Training at the Workplace in Europe: The Application of an International Typology.” In Peter Docherty, ed., Diversity in Work Organisation--International Perspectives. Stockholm, Sweden: National Institute for Working Life (Arbetslivsinstitutet).