Worrying reports indicate the negative impact DEI and other woke initiatives are having on the British workplace and indicate that the problems this is causing in the workplace are seriously undermining productivity and prosperity. Were this only limited to large employers it would be bad enough, but the real problem is in the small to medium enterprise (SME) sector (companies under 250 employees). There, it is leading to a culture of fear where colleagues who have worked together for years are now stepping on eggshells around each other and where losing your job for saying the wrong thing is now a greater fear than losing it because your employer goes bust.
Last week I published an essay and an article in the Daily Sceptic about how management tools developed by Human Resources in the 1980s and 90s have been used to fast track controversial political ideologies into the workplace and force compliance from employees. I explored how this is creating a chilling effect on the British workplace as employees are increasingly worried about saying the wrong thing, upsetting the wrong person. The consequence is an environment of fear, resentment and paranoia, all fatal to the successful operation of any organisation. This is ultimately undermining our prosperity as a nation by hitting productivity at a time when we desperately need to be pulling together and focusing on economic growth. Headlines such as the 2019 case of Asda worker Brian Leitch who was fired for sharing a Billy Connolly joke on his private social media account contribute to this culture of fear.
Because the recent articles focused HR they primarily highlighted the corporate world of the large employer. Our society, from media to politicians, tends to focus on the large corporate world, despite only having 39% of workers. Since the articles were published I have received a great deal of feedback from SME-sized organisations.
I’ll be publishing some of the quotes I’ve received from both small business owners and employees of small businesses in a future article. But I have to report that the problems we see in our larger employers are now very much the norm in our smaller ones as well.
Indeed, recent reports by both His Majesty’s Government and the Free Speech Union have concluded that DEI is creating serious problems in our workplace and specifically causing stress, fear and job insecurity for many. Worryingly, 36% of workers report that they have seen a colleague punished or disciplined for refusing to attend training sessions in DEI, Unconscious Bias, White Supremacy and Allyship. Even more disconcerting is that 11% report that colleagues have been fired or forced out of their jobs for the same. Whilst the Free Speech Union is doing a superb job of standing up for the rights of workers across Britain, there appears to be a tsunami of cases that never get that far.
Here’s the thing. In Britain most people work in SMEs and 99% of all companies are SMEs. We are still what Napoleon called a “nation of shopkeepers”, 200 years on. SMEs tend not to have HR departments, they tend not to spend lots of money on DEI training. Since the 2020 pandemic, SMEs have borne the brunt of company economic pain, huge amounts of trade have been transferred from the SME market to the large corporates, some of the laws during lockdown even shut SMEs whilst permitting supermarkets to remain open. The ‘bonfire of red tape’ promised by the Tories post-Brexit hasn’t happened, quite the opposite, taxation is now making self-employment almost worthless. Meanwhile, Britain’s long-suffering small business owners are vilified and slandered as some sort of Monopoly Board 1920s mini evil capitalists, only interested in exploiting the labour of their colleagues.
SME owners are often quite ignorant of the nuances of employment law and they often misinterpret laws like the Equalities Act 2010. I have encountered clients where the owner thinks it is a legal requirement for her to demand that her employees state their pronouns and that if she doesn’t insist, her business will be named and shamed and she will be forced to close. Another I worked with unlawfully refused to follow the stipulations of the Equalities Act 2010 because “he didn’t want any of that woke nonsense” in his company. Another problem here is that SMEs often rely on independent HR consultancies to provide support and some of them are as ideologically captured as many HR departments in our largest employers. The confusion, sometimes deliberately spread, means that business owners will usually default on the side of caution. Unlike Civil Service departments, NHS Trusts or Blue Chip Corporates, small businesses have to be productive, they cannot afford to spend weeks on superfluous activities that are not directly contributing to the bottom line. Therefore, when they do implement new rules and policies at work, they tend to do it in the ‘my way or the highway’ approach. Even if they don’t agree with them, they do this from fear.
The response from employees is reciprocal fear. Relationships that took years to build are shattered as the trust melts away.
Sometime in the last 20 years or so, the general assumption was that most people are, at heart, decent, and want what is best for their family, friends and the people with whom they interact. Jordan Peterson has discussed this at length. Most people are, at heart, committed to being good when interacting with others. We were once a high trust society and high trust societies are highly functional and productive. Then at some point in the last 20 years this was replaced by the assumption that people were bad, could not be trusted, were inevitably racist, homophobic, transphobic etc. unless they were told not to be by their betters. Doubt this? Open any newspaper on any day of the week and there will be at least one article berating the British working classes for being too fat, lazy, stupid, racist, homophobic, aggressive, intolerant etc. Prior to Brexit those who held these opinions at least had the good grace not to publicly express them. When the majority voted Brexit, they started to openly express their contempt, labelling them racists, ‘gammon’ etc. Eminent academics like A.C. Grayling showed their true opinions about those less fortunate than themselves by effectively demanding that “clever people should have more of a vote than others”. Every week there are articles in the ‘liberal’ press condemning ‘populism’ as ‘anti-democratic’, surely an oxymoronic position – unless by ‘democracy’ you mean, as they seem to, “when people vote for us”.
What has any of this got to do with the SME workplace? Well, it is really quite simple: this breakdown in trust in our society, this open contempt for the working classes contributes to the atmosphere of fear and insecurity in the SME workplace. What better way to get the proles to ‘behave themselves’ than to make them insecure about their jobs?
It is imperative that we reverse this and restore trust, tolerance, mutual respect and friendship to the British workplace, in particular to the SMEs. If we do not then our nation is heading for a very dark place indeed because the spirit of enterprise relies on trust, tolerance, mutual respect, diversity of opinion, teamwork, freedom of expression and freedom of speech to flourish. Western capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty, globally, than any other economic model. Nations only started to create the wealth necessary to support complex societies with the wealth and efficiencies created by a free market economy. The USSR and Communist system collapsed because planned economies do not work in the real world. Demand must drive an economy, and planned economies fail to meet demand. Worse, they require that their workforce be restricted in the freedom of choice of career and freedom of enterprise. Freedom of thought, expression and speech and a prosperous economy go hand in hand. You cannot separate them.
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.
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