3-minute read

Dermot Feenan

LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law (non-practising) FRSA

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BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Bottom Line’ recently broadcast a programme ‘Class in the workplace’. The programme description (below) and the programme itself (available here) leave much to be desired. I offer below an alternative programme description, one that acknowledges relevant socio-legal realities around social class.

Programme description

How can companies create a level playing field for applicants and employees from lower socio-economic backgrounds? Evan Davis and guests discuss the sometimes invisible barriers and assumptions which exclude some from getting jobs or getting promoted. Many believe that the job interview format tends to favour the social skills of those from the middle and upper middle classes. Diversity schemes help – but there are questions about whether they go far enough. Is this the final taboo when it comes to equality in employment?

Alternative programme description

How can companies stop discriminating against applicants and employees on the basis of social class? Evan Davis and some other people in predominantly middle-class occupations won’t address this phenomenon. They’ll not even mention discrimination. They will trot out some tired old information which most of us who experience and study social class discrimination in the UK know reveals a social problem that goes back centuries, remains endemic and is, regrettably, usually down to more than ‘sometimes invisible barriers and assumptions’. This is despite the fact that techniques of discrimination are often painfully visible and involve well-documented, predictable classist stereotypes. Yet, the BBC will attempt to titillate and obfuscate the audience with references to what it calls ‘the final taboo’.

The BBC will not address whether social class should, as many have argued, be included as a ‘protected characteristic’ in Part 2 of the Equality Act 2010, which would prohibit such discrimination in the workplace. Nor will the BBC address whether the UK government should, as many have also argued, implement section 1 of the Equality Act 2010, which would impose a duty on public authorities when making decisions of a strategic nature about how to exercise their functions (including through direct employment and outsourcing) to have due regard to the desirability of exercising them in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage.

The BBC will also try to draw in and keep its audience by pitching vacuous suspense, viz. that ‘there are questions about whether [diversity schemes] go far enough’. This is despite the fact that ‘diversity’ schemes have already been extensively critiqued. One of the key conceptual issues, as noted in a blog on the challenges of measuring diversity in the legal profession, is that there is a lack of consensus as to what ‘diversity’ aims to achieve, whether, for example, ‘representation’, ‘different voice’ or ‘celebration of differences’, and what those elaborations entail.

It has been argued, principally by persons of colour, that corporate diversity schemes can simply serve corporate reputation. Sara Ahmed argued in her book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life that institutional claims to promote diversity can operate to obscure racism. But the BBC won’t be addressing these complexities. Nor will the BBC be questioning whether the tendency of ‘the job interview format’ to favour the social skills of those from the middle and upper middle classes is a matter of ‘belief’ (as the programme description conveys). This is also despite the fact that there is evidence of such discrimination on the basis of social class.

A survey of UK employers found that 86 per cent admit to social class bias during interviews. Similar research in the US throws light on the precise techniques used in social class discrimination during interview. Professor Michael W. Krauss and colleagues at Yale University reported in 2019 on the identification of social class based on exposure to brief speech patterns, and that this cues biased hiring decisions in favour of those higher versus lower in social class.

Nor does the BBC offer to examine the other ways class discrimination infects the hiring process beyond interview, despite extensive research pointing to such varied discrimination, including by Professor Nicole C. Jones Young in the USA. This rejection of evidence of actual discrimination and reframing of the issue as a matter of belief (as if it were, say, a question of faith) is part of the problem with classism in the UK – but that, too, won’t be addressed by the BBC.

Also, the BBC won’t be interviewing anyone currently in the working class who can speak – directly, eloquently, and compellingly – about the material deprivation and psychological injury that follows from experiencing social class discrimination in the UK (especially in England). And that will include anyone from the precariat, a social class written about extensively, for at least a decade, including by Guy Standing in his landmark book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Talk of the precariat might raise uncomfortable issues about the reliance of the BBC and the employers of its guests on outsourced workers, afforded fewer legal protections and more likely to be subject to degrading treatment than those in full-time, continuing employment contracts…

It’s perhaps no surprise then that if you search for references to The Bottom Line’s ‘Class in the workplace’ on Twitter, the vast majority of comments come from white professionals comfortably off in high socioeconomic strata. Many working-class listeners, especially from the most disadvantaged populations such as Black and GRT people, evidently know better than to listen to these bourgeois pieties.

The Bottom Line, my arse … no pun intended.

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© Dermot Feenan 2021