Valorising Equality: Politics and Equality Legislation in Crisis

Can the cost of implementing equality legislation in organisations be calculated?  Does the cost of NOT implementing the legislation need to appear somewhere in such a hypothetical equation? Is there a limit to the amount of equality that can be usefully achieved in organisations? Should organisations that seek to go beyond ‘marginally productive’ equality be discouraged or even legally prevented from doing so?  To a sociologist these questions seem incongruous but they stem from a neo-liberal view of equality reflected in recent political discourse on equality legislation in Great Britain.  The new discourse signals changing social policy on equality legitimised by the hegemonic view that austerity is the only response to economic crisis and premised by an underlying assumption that equality is profligate.  Business case arguments for equality, which are underpinned by a concept of ‘value-added’, have dominated managerial discourse for some time but up until now they have had virtually no impact on equality legislation.  Indeed, in policy terms, the ‘monetisation’ of equality stands in stark contrast to a proactive, ‘reflexive’ approach to equality legislation that was beginning to materialise in the years leading up to the economic crisis.  Interestingly, powers to devolve some aspects of equality legislation in Great Britain to Scotland and Wales have highlighted the rift in these approaches. The effects of austerity measures on the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity and disability are becoming widely documented but little has been reported on the ability of equality legislation developed prior to the crisis to protect women from its disproportionate impact.  In a period when it is argued that little separates the main political parties in the UK, this paper examines two quite different social policy approaches to equality legislation separated by only a brief time period but intersected by the economic crisis and a general election.