The official inquiry into the UK government’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will not come to its conclusions for some time. In the meantime, we are reminded of our own pandemic experiences, such as those that followed the Prime Minister’s instructions on national television on 23 March 2020 to all but the most essential workers to ‘stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives’. As a result, our daily experiences of working dramatically changed. With that change came an imperative for managers, guided by HR colleagues, to adapt established policies and procedures to deal with the enforced modifications to working arrangements.
Although there was much rhetoric around that time of us ‘all being in it together’, this did not tally with the experiences of many minoritised groups. The pandemic exposed the inequalities in our social structures. Racially minoritised workers found themselves ‘over-exposed and under-protected’ on the front lines of our essential services. For others, the exposure effect of the pandemic took place behind closed doors. Disabled employees, LGBT+ workers and those living with socioeconomic disadvantage found themselves invisible to policy makers, whether at government or organisational level, as the impacts of lockdown were being considered. Enforced working from home sometimes affected these groups in ways of which their fellow workers and managers were unaware.
Some insights into the issues that minority groups faced during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were revealed in the findings of the COVID-19 Social Study. This study collected data from 70,000 respondents between March 2020 and April 2021 and documented the higher psychological impacts affecting key workers, women, ethnic minorities, people in lower socioeconomic groups, younger people and people with disabilities and/or long-term health problems during this time.
Against this background, questions arise about how these differing experiences may have impacted working lives and whether those differences found expression during the pandemic through established collective employee voice mechanisms. These questions motivated my decision, last year, to return to my PhD research participants – the network of trade union equality reps that exists within union workplace structures. My research had found that although small in number (a cadre of approximately 3,000 around Great Britain), equality reps play an important role in amplifying the voices of women and minorities in the workplace. Returning to speak to a group of equality reps about their experiences during that early phase of the pandemic, I found that they had continued to provide a much-needed channel through which minority issues had been raised. Perhaps even more importantly, I found that they had, in many instances, been able to persuade managers to be more flexible and adaptable in the ways in which the new emergency working-from-home policies were being implemented.
Some equality reps felt that the managers they were engaging with had welcomed the intervention of the union in what were uncharted waters for them. Equality reps felt they had been given a degree of ‘expert’ power, thanks to the wealth of COVID-19-related information and advice that their union head offices and the TUC had provided. In contrast, managers, they felt, had not been as well informed by their organisations. They also reflected on how members had often been more willing to reveal the problems they were facing to a fellow worker in a union rep position than to their managers, some of whom were initially reluctant to make ‘exceptions’ to blanket policies. Many such examples related to workplaces where employees had been instructed to work from home, but some had subsequently found this difficult to sustain because of difficult home situations, mental health conditions or a basic lack of internet connectivity.
So, what lessons can be drawn from the support provided by equality reps during the pandemic? Firstly, that changes to working practices affect people in different ways, and it is important to have mechanisms at work that capture voices and represent those different experiences, taking the onus away from individuals’ having to raise them for themselves when they may already feel vulnerable. Secondly, that the extension of the current network of trade union equality reps could provide this mechanism to more workers in a broader range of organisations. Thirdly, that the contribution that an expanded pressure of equality reps would make has the potential to facilitate more collaborative and inclusive working policies and practices in the future.
Trade unions themselves will need to be ready to adapt to ensure that they are being inclusive of minority interests within the broader collective of their membership. Encouraging more local union teams to appoint an equality rep is an important element of this much-needed revitalisation. However, the current lack of statutory rights to ‘facility time’ for equality reps is hampering this ambition, leaving many of them reliant on either taking on multiple union representative roles in order to access at least some paid time off for trade union duties, or being forced to carry out these supporting activities in their own time.
COVID-19 has shown us how important it is for organisations to hear the voices of the marginalised and minoritised, and to respond to the issues they may be raising. It has also provided a stark reminder of the risks of not listening and acting on such minority voices. My research has highlighted how important it is for those voices to be represented by independent trade union representatives with special expertise in equality issues. It has also highlighted the potential benefits of introducing statutory rights for equality reps. Let’s hope that we can build on these lessons as we go forward into the new world of work emerging from our pandemic experiences – with a more collaborative and inclusive approach to employee voices, with equality reps playing their full part.
Joyce Mamode is a post-doctoral researcher, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London
Image credit Wikimedia Commons via Wikimedia.
