Equality of what

What does this actual mean to people and to organisation?

“Democratic system does not guarantee equality of conditions it only guarantees equality of opportunity.”

When we talk about equality how does organisation go about putting it into action?

And what does it gives us when we start asking question like equality to whom?

Where is our starting point for advantage and disadvantage of equality of opportunity?

Culture as emergence

According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, culture is not static ‘thing’ but something, which everyone is constantly creating, affirming and expressing. She writes about, "the admonitions, excuses, and moral judgements by which the people mutually coerce one another into conformity." (Douglas 1985: xxiii)

In this view culture is not imposed from outside but exposed from within; any programme on equality which attempts to change culture in a planned way is likely to miss the mark.

What steps are organisations actual doing to implement equality in all its glory?

What steps are you taking to have a foundation of the principles of fairness, cross the strands of age, race, gender, disability sexual orientation, religious belief.

• What is your starting point?
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Is there emotional side to sectors within our society for example the Third sector, private sector and the Public sector is there a responsibility for

Business has become, in this last half-century, the most powerful institution on the planet. The dominant institution in any society needs to take responsibility for the whole.
Futurist Willis Harman (1918-1997)

A few principles that as all humans have basic emotional needs:

• Each of us has similar, but different emotional needs
• Emotional needs vary more in extent than in type
• Emotional needs vary more than physical needs
• Emotional needs are more basic and as important as "rights"

Negative feelings are indications of our unmet emotional needs

• Feelings are real and are not debatable.
• Invalidation damages self-esteem
• High self-esteem is needed for life’s pursuits, productivity, job satisfaction, and customer service
• Group harmony requires both shared need satisfaction and common respect of feelings.
• Importance of Emotions

Our bodies communicate with us and others to tell us what we need, the better our communication, the better we feel.

• Emotions help us establish our boundaries on certain subjects and our bonding and bridging.
• Emotions have the potential to unite and connect us on certain subjects.
• Emotions can serve as our inner moral and ethical compass on certain subjects.
• Emotions are essential for good decision making.
  

What doesn't feel good to us normally doesn't feel good to others. But to understand the importance of this, we must first be in touch with our own feelings.

So how do organisation assessed this human principles round equality and diversity, and what feelings are attached to equality and diversity within the organisation.

The key feelings you want your customers, clients or service users and citizens to have when engaging with your service is following with regard to fairness, values, beliefs. Is this a want to have or a need to have.

The following principles have to happen within the service provision:
Respected, Important, Remembered, Acknowledged, Satisfied, Helped, Understood. Basically the boils down to dignity and respected and choice and control and empowerment.

• What do you think?
• Doe’s it matter?

The emotional Leadership on Equality and diversity

Institutions that endure do not do so because of a single, charismatic leader, but because of a culture that fosters leadership throughout the system" - Max Weber, sociologist, 1864-1920

Three fundamental facts about human beings: exceptionality, essentiality, and equality.

Exceptionality means that all of us are exceptions to the rule. No two human beings are exactly alike.
Essentiality refers to everyone’s need to feel needed to feel essential, but not central.
Equality means that we each want to share our voices. People must feel that they have a right and a responsibility to lift up their visions of a better society.

How does it feel to realise that?

Is a great question to ask leadership whenever someone tells you about some ‘light bulb moment’ or a time when they made a real difference around Equality and diversity?

How many questions have been asked around how to truly embed Equality and Diversity within an organisation like the writing running through the middle of sea side rock? You can break it any way and get that theme running through it. That’s how Equality and Diversity should be.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?
  

Do we want equality or is equality need?

As John Donne had it ‘No man is an island’ or if you prefer an even older source, as Cain asks God ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ and the answer of all world religions is ‘yes’ – we are here to look after one another, and not to ‘walk by on the other side.’

Our Prime Minster Gordon Brown is said to be fond of quoting this piece of poetry which for me sums it all up:

“It's the hands of others that grow the food we eat, sew the clothes we wear, build the homes we inhabit It's the hands of others that tend us when we are sick and lift us up when we fall It's the hands of others that bring us into the world and lower us into the grave.”

So, if you accept that people are not necessarily born with the patterns of inequality, injustice, unfairness, prejudice, ignorance, indifference, inaction, if most people prefer to live peaceably with their neighbours, why and how did we get to a state were in society we have lost our way on Equality and becomes so are we cut off from ethos Fairness, Rights, Equality, Discrimination, Autonomy.

The reason why equality in Britain is seen to be failing by some is not because there is not enough interest in it. It is because we haven’t really tried it yet. Or understand it yet.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Managing diversity a growing challenge

MANAGEMENT of diversity and equality of opportunitiy already provides one of the greatest organisational challenges facing society if we look at the private sector, public sector, thrid sector.

And, with organisation increasingly watching the bottom line, is diversity simply a “need to have” rather than a “want to have”?

Where equal oportunties focuses largely on compliance with legislation, diversity is more about respecting and understanding differences while helping maximise potential.

The two are distinct issues, but neither can be looked at in isolation because one feeds the other.

From that standpoint, it is important to recognise that the incoming Equality Bill remains firmly on the UK Government’s agenda.

The three aspects of measurements that will include:

• Equality of Outcome
• Equality of Process
• Equality of Autonomy

For the most part, it is intended to simplify existing legislation, but will also extend the scope of certain discriminatory grounds.

For example, age will become a ground for challenge in the provision of goods and services, while the public-sector equality duties currently covering gender, race and disability, will be expanded to age, sexual orientation and religion or belief.

Though the private sector is not directly affected by the equality duties, they inevitably have a knock-on effect when private companies are involved in public-sector procurement processes. Organisations will increasingly be asked to produce evidence of their work on equality and diversity.

But the prospect of changes under the Equality Bill is not the only front on which organisations are coming under more pressure to improve their practices.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is about to place the financial services and construction sectors under the spotlight in two formal inquiries.

One will tackle alleged barriers to employment for ethnic minority employees in the construction industry and the other will concentrate on the apparently higher proportion of women working in some areas of financial services that are paid less than their male counterparts and suffer harassment at work.

Given the current downturn, the inquiries will examine whether redundancies are disproportionately affecting women and ethnic minorities.

The cost of getting it wrong, the Price of getting wrong are two different things as the emotional affect on diversity and equality of ingroance, indifference, inaction not only manifests itself in the potential for liagaition, but also in higher staff attrition rates, greater costs and more difficulties when trying to hire the best people.

On the other hand, investing the time to manage workplace diversity effectively can result in the creation of a more committed and loyal workforce, increased productivity and the provision of a better service to custormers and key stakeholders.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Political parties of all sides voices fear over BNP victory

Political party of all sides have warned that the UK's main parties are "complacent" about the British National Party, after the BNP won a local election.

Labour MP Peter Hain told the BBC that Labour's own supporters were being targeted by the far right.

He said the government needed to make sure local, rather than foreign, workers were prioritised for jobs.

A BNP leader said the recession had helped the party win because potential supporters were being hit hardest.

Mr Hain was speaking after the BNP won a seat at a by-election for Sevenoaks Council in Kent

A Labour councillor previously held the seat, in the Swanley St Mary’s ward.

BNP candidate Paul Golding received 408 votes, beating Labour's Mike Hogg by 86 votes.

Mr Golding said local young people has voted BNP because they found it "almost impossible" to get a council house. He blamed a policy that allocated council houses to "foreigners and asylum seekers".

Mr Hain said: "All political parties, but especially the Labour party, have got to prioritise the fight against the BNP.

He said there was a "real danger" of complacency in the Labour party.

"It is areas when Labour has traditionally been strong - like Swanley where the BNP has been making a great deal of headway and exploiting fears, ignorance, indifference, inaction and spreading their racist and fascist beliefs."

"We need to take them on at the grass roots level and as a government we need to be making sure that we address the fears the BNP are exploiting."

BNP deputy leader Simon Darby said the recession and people's fears about the economy were the main factor in its victory - which the party has hailed as a "significant breakthrough" in southeast England.

Foreign workers

He said: "The credit crunch - or the depression as it now is, is no longer a spectator sport and it is starting to hurt our people very hard."

Mr Darby said the party - which says it has about 100 council seats in Britain - was looking forward to the European parliament elections in June.

"We will do very nicely indeed," he predicted.

Mr Hain denied that Gordon Brown's speech in which he promised "British jobs for British workers" had helped the BNP to win.

Instead he blamed the controversy over foreign companies who brought their own workers into Britain, rather than employing local people.

He said he "did not believe" assurances that the companies were not undercutting local wages and ignoring nationally-agreed pay and conditions agreements.

Giving local people the first chance to apply for new jobs should be a "priority" Mr Hain added.

The Conservative MP for Sevenoaks, Michael Fallon, described the BNP's victory as "worrying".

“Question for society and people “

When times get hard this is the time when equality and diversity should be discussed more Not fear and indifference, Ignorance, inaction. Difference is a way of coming up with different solution for the times however we need that common shared social glue that binds us as a human race.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Pause a bit and check our emotions

“Real knowledge knows the extent of one's ignorance." — Confucius

I would venture to say that many, perhaps most of us working in the areas of Equality field of around age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religious belief, or Human Rights field, Informal Logic and critical thinking like to think of the practice to which we are committed as progressive, as contributing to social betterment and intellectual advance.

We may prefer to imagine ourselves out toiling in those conceptual fields, boots immersed in the muddy waters, planting and grafting as well as pruning and weeding, and perhaps even harvesting a crop from time to time. I suspect that most of us, whatever our political stripe, would resist the idea that we are confined by the very nature of our disciplinary practice, to simply uphold and perhaps rearrange the status quo, either intellectually or politically.

My view of the matter, for what it is worth, is that there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of Equality process. My view may be expressed by saying that every discovery around equality contains ‘an unfounded element’, or ‘a creative insight in the process.

As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once put it: "The paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling."

·       What do you find inconsistent in your life and the activities around Equality issues?

·       What paradoxes can you share?

·       What do you think?

·       Does it matter?