Earlier this month, I published an article exploring how Equality, Equity Diversity and Inclusion took over the British workplace, focusing on the response to the George Floyd killing and how this, with lockdown, created a huge demand for EDI, lowering the quality and elevating EDI from a minor sub department in HR to a core function of organisations. Now, in Part Two, we explore how Corporate Environment, Social Responsibility and Governance (ESG) policies are driving EDI and political ideologies into smaller businesses.
Why is EDI an issue? Surely it is a good idea? Well, since the Cass Report earlier this year, the publication of the Department of Business and Trade’s report into EDI (March 2024), the Free Speech Union’s Dynata report (April 2024) and the Policy Exchange report (May 2024) suggest there are concerns that the road to hell appears to be paved with good intentions. All these reports highlight significant issues with EDI as it has been implemented and indicate that it is having the opposite effect of that intended; driving division, exclusion, isolation, stress, fear and ultimately job loses with hundreds of thousands having left their employment due to their reaction to EDI training or having been fired, possibly unlawfully, for having opinions that clash with those being taught through EDI. You can read about this here.
Encouragingly, there is now an open discussion amongst a small number of influential HR people on LinkedIn since March this year. This has simply not happened before, with any dissenters being silenced through personal attacks. The topic of this discussion is the negative impact poor EDI is having on productivity, staff turnover, and therefore revenue, and how this can no longer be ignored.
The Free Speech Union’s report, quoted above, makes for some very concerning reading. There is often a misconception that most people in Britain work in large organisations. It is depressing that every time a politician comes up with another ‘business initiative’ they secure the backing of large corporates, completely ignoring that most people in the U.K. (61%) work in small to medium sized businesses – i.e. under 250 employees. SMEs account for 99.9% of all U.K. businesses. Yet the report indicates that 65% of U.K. employees have experienced some form of EDI training either at their workplace or their most recent workplace. So why are so many SMEs putting their staff through EDI?
I run an SME, and having run several and worked for many over the years. I can tell you now that SMEs rarely, if ever, provide superfluous training to their employees, preferring to only train when there is a contractual or statutory requirement to do so. With tight resources, there is simply not enough time to spend investing in training that is not directly related to the role. So if that is the case: why are SMEs training EDI? Answer: their clients demand that they do before they are considered fit to supply. Much of this is sadly news for the general public and it shows the mendacity around using procurement to drive political ideologies. Such demands are made under the curtain of ‘commercial confidentiality’ and can therefore be hidden from public access requests. We’ve seen a similar tactic in education where activists hide content from parents behind ‘commercial confidentiality’ contracts.
About 30 years ago, we started to see the idea of ‘Sustainable Procurement’ entering the procurement profession. This was sensible; it was part of what used to be called ‘Corporate Responsibility’. Sustainable Procurement meant that you worked with companies which had firm policies around things like Health and Safety, ethical waste disposal policies, ethical sourcing, etc. As time went by, we saw environmental issues being added. Suppliers had to demonstrate that they were actively reducing carbon emissions. We also began to see the ‘S’ – Social Responsibility – becoming part of this. Customers wanted reassurance that suppliers took issues like discrimination seriously. By 2004, the UN had formally identified ESG as an idea in their report ‘Who Cares Wins’. ESG was here to stay.
And, who could possibly argue that it was a bad idea? Well, as I have already said once in this article, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We were told that people were increasingly concerned about social justice and environmental justice, although we were never told who was concerned or how much they were concerned. Controversial policies like Net Zero were added into the ESG mix, controversial because they had rarely been debated. People were unilaterally informed that they had no choice but to comply with these new policies, no matter how much they cost. ‘Diversity’ was narrowly defined as diversity of appearance, sexuality, gender, sex, ability, rather than diversity of experience, thought and opinion. ‘Inclusion’ was corrupted through intersectional identity politics, and ‘affirmative action’ was now based on immutable characteristics of identity groups, based on assumed privilege rather than on individual socioeconomic circumstances. By the 2010s, private equity firms were putting ESG front and centre, making it a condition of procurement. The World Economic Forum developed a points system so companies could assess their ESG ‘rating’. Suddenly, it mattered whether or not your company ‘celebrated Pride’, and scores were allocated for increasingly radical support for increasingly radical ideas. This was ‘Corporate Wokery’ – the deliberate politicisation of the corporate world so companies could now be used to drive recalcitrant populations into accepting increasingly Left-wing policies.
As society took a large leap to the Left in the 2010s, the population was told that it was unacceptable to question the new givens. So, question Net Zero, whether trans women are women or ask why affirmative action resulted in lots of public school-educated black people working at the BBC and no working class Glaswegians, and you were not only told to shut up, but you were smeared as being intolerant, deplorable, a racist, homophobe, transphobe, etc. As the new orthodoxies were adopted wholesale by the establishment, they were added to ESG and therefore procurement requirements. It was no longer sufficient to demonstrate that your business had an Anti-Slavery Policy and an Asbestos Policy. You had to demonstrate that you were ideologically aligned. So, procurement started to demand evidence that Equality, Equity Diversity and Inclusion was being taken seriously by suppliers, and provide evidence not just of policies but also evidence of training.
So, if you were selling paperclips to your local NHS Trust, suddenly you had to demonstrate that you had an EDI policy and that you trained your staff in EDI. Small businesses would frequently turn to the internet and, in a box-ticking exercise, purchase the cheapest online EDI training available. Unfortunately, as we have learned from the reports quoted above, EDI needs to be very carefully and sensitively deployed, and even more carefully trained if you do not wish to piss off a significant proportion of your workforce (63% in the FSU report). Poor quality EDI is likely to create significant issues for SMEs, and any issue that impacts the happiness and wellbeing of staff is far more of a problem for smaller employers who cannot afford staff turnover issues or disengaged, disinterested staff.
A constant refrain of ‘woke’ policies is that in their rush to force them onto people, those advocating them forget two major points. Firstly, they lied about the positions taken by ESG and EDI as being ‘settled’ and beyond debate to the point that if you dared question them, you were morally reprehensible. Secondly, that social engineering – which is what this is – is both extremely complex and difficult to do successfully. Crude attempts to force radical ideologies onto a population are always doomed to fail when the population starts to question why even asking a question is unacceptable. All it takes is for someone to point out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes, and the whole edifice comes crashing down.
And that is what we are seeing now. People are no longer afraid of being smeared as something they are not for simply questioning the adoption of a radical policy that was fringe until a few days ago. They tend to react badly when ‘Unconscious Bias’ trainers call them all incorrigible bigots who need to be ‘fixed’ by their employers. Corporate activism is collapsing all over the world because, like its partner in politics, it has over reached itself. It is one thing to ensure that a supplier disposes of its waste water properly; it is quite another to demand that the same supplier sends its management team on your EDI training courses, as happened to one of our clients recently at an NHS Trust.
‘Get woke, go broke’ is being proven from Hollywood to Hull. People are weary, fed up and bored of the constant demands of activists. They have woken up to the cynicism of corporate wokery and they are voting with their feet and their wallets. Last week, Kemi Badenoch, the U.K.’s Business and Trade Secretary, urged businesses to focus on their customers and to avoid politics and activism. So ingrained is the issue that in her own department, the Royal Academy of Engineers is recruiting another EDI specialist to join its team of 15 EDI specialists. With Pride 2024 on the horizon, we can fully expect the volume around this debate to increase.
However, the pressure on SMEs is relentless, and it is our opinion that unless specific legislation is written, protecting employees from political or ideological training in the workplace, this issue will not be solved any time soon. Of course, an entire industry has built up to supply training in: ‘diversity’; ‘inclusivity’; ‘allyship’. A quick glance at LinkedIn will indicate how absurd this has become with one ‘consultant’ urging men to get their nails decorated for ‘inclusion’. More serious is this blog article from lawyers Shoosmiths advising corporate clients how to drive (read ‘bully’) EDI down their supply chains.
So, what about SMEs who are being forced to implement EDI by corporate or public sector procurement departments? How do you tick the boxes without damaging your business? If you refuse, you will simply be dropped as a supplier. Well, we’ve set up www.fairjob.co.uk to help you navigate this and to repair any damage caused by poor EDI to date. Get in touch if you need some help for your organisation.
We are seeing that the worm may have turned against the politicisation of the workplace, but there is a long way to go. If Labour wins next month, it could get a lot worse before it gets any better.
Dig in, folks.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.
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Hats off once more to Mr Strachan
I did wonder about this sentence:
“About 30 years ago, we started to see the idea of ‘Sustainable Procurement’ entering the procurement profession. This was sensible”
The article seems to go on to demonstrate that it was not sensible
It is the way of the left. Propose something that no-one could reasonably argue as being a bad idea (i.e. End Violence towards Women’) and by the time its been corrupted and twisted, it becomes and overbearing set of rules and regulations that don’t address the issue they were devised for, but are used simply an another yoke for the masses to be silenced with.
The whole concept of sustainability is fraught with problems as to what is sustainable and not. One example. Earlier this year we stopped people using plastic disposable/recyclable plates, knives, forks. In are wheeled the sustainable replacements. Plates made from bagasse, a fibrous by-product of the sugar cane industry, shipped here in dirty great diesel ships from South America and the West Indies. The cutlery has been replaced with bamboo, and is not only useless, but is primarily produced in China, put in 80ft containers and sent on a dirty great diesel ship half way round the world and back again.
I suppose it depends where in the life of a product you draw the two lines for beginning and end. As with climate, it seems to be where it suits the claimant best, not representing the actuality in full.
100%
I’m old school- always switch lights off, don’t chuck stuff away that still works, turn the shower off while soaping myself, buy quality goods that last, don’t order food I won’t eat, eat leftovers for lunch, don’t buy crap I don’t need
Thats great but you don’t need the government to coerce you into any of that.
Absolutely and nor would I want them to try
If I see a product or business using sustainable as a selling point, or as belonging to BCorp I avoid it. I wonder has anyone else had the awful experience of purchasing something not realising it was made from recyclible plastic etc. I bought a raincoat from an equine supplies company, I hadn’t realised it was made from this stuff, it wasn’t cheap and its awful to wear as the fabric does not breathe and essentially heats you up to boiling point and then allows you to gently simmer in your own sweat.
What is wrong with natural products, wool, cotton, etc.
In my experience black people and gay people find this kind of crap patronising and essentially an effort to depict a fictitious world. We know from our daily human interactions how dank and ambiguous other human beings can be even if they are kith and kin. We all know that the human mind is a bit funny when it comes to differences but we arrive at a satisfactory arrangement. That’s the key. Tell these pople where to go because they are the weirdos trying to impose an artificial reality.
The author once again fails to recognise the bad intentions of coercive collectivists. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. Again and again until they have fully imposed their worldview on everyone. Collectivists needs to be fought every inch of the way not appeased and accommodated.
not at all – I am well versed in where this came from and can bore you at length around the Frankfurt School, Marx, Lenin, the COMITERN and Yuri Bezemov.
There are bad actors but the article is exploring HOW this has become so ubiquitous HOW it has been forced on SMEs and just like the Bolshevik revolution it is down to Useful Idiots thinking they are doing something good
I can assure you that 99.999% of business executives out there are not moustache twirling Chekists. Cock up always trumps conspiracy.
We need to know HOW this has happened to know how to reverse it. I am doing that, it’s my business – and I can tell you right now if you go into an HR Director and start talking about the Frankfurt School, Klaus Schwaub and how Yuri was right – you last about 5 minutes before you are shown the door.
I wouldn’t worry too much this agenda is already past its sell-by date. It is just the final charade as they mop up anything left in terms of wealth. Their survival strategy is a doomed one but they are sticking to it I’m afraid. People wonder about their mindset – it is the mindset of a desperate junkie who will rob his own family for his next fix.
Diversity = Less White People.————This intolerance in the name of tolerance where blithering idiots get themselves into a tizzy about everything they don’t agree with and call it “fascism” or “oppression” or “racist” is about as absurd as it gets and it seems that we are emerging from the period of great prosperity that we have taken for granted and instead of improving on that and growing as society we have turned collectively dumb instead.
Bravo, clear exposition of what the vast majority feels. I still don’t understand the ultimate goal of those who are actually pushing this agenda (and I don’t think they are truly ‘left-wing’).
those who set the bomb want to destroy western society – it takes a very small number of bad actors to destroy a civilisation – how many Bolsheviks were there? It takes a lot of Useful Idiots who nod along without asking questions, social media and smartphones to spread it as quickly as this has spread.
It’s a social contagion like anything else. Only its turbocharged thought groupthink – See this: https://youtu.be/N9lY_tENCVM