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Ethnic Minorities and Equal Treatment: The Impact of Gender, Equal Opportunities Policies and Trade Unions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Mike Noon  and
Kim Hoque
Mike Noon*
Affiliation:
Business School, De Montfort University, Leicester
Kim Hoque*
Affiliation:
School of Management, University of Bath
*
e-mail mnoon@dmu.ac.uk
e-mail d.k.hoque@bath.ac.uk
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Abstract

The article examines whether ethnic minority employees report poorer treatment at work than white employees, and evaluates the impact of three key features — gender differences, formal equal opportunities policies and trade union recognition. The analysis reveals that ethnic minority men and women receive poorer treatment than their white counterparts. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that ethnic minority women receive poorer treatment than ethnic minority men. Equal opportunities policies are effective in ensuring equal treatment, but the presence of a recognised trade union is not. White men and women in unionised workplaces enjoy better treatment than their white counterparts in non-union workplaces, but the same is not true for ethnic minorities. By contrast, there is very little evidence of unequal treatment in non-union workplaces.

Type
Research Article
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 176 , April 2001 , pp. 105 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

∗

We would like to thank Andy Charlwood, Jay Dahya, Gill Dix, John Forth, Ed Heery, Stephen Machin, Neil Millward and Keith Whitfield for their helpful comments and suggestions. We also acknowledge the Department of Trade and Industry, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Advisory, Conciliatory and Arbitration Service and the Policy Studies Institute as the originators of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey data, and the Data Archive at the University of Essex as the distributor of the data. None of these organisations bears any responsibility for our analysis and interpretation of the data.

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