News
Diversity in EQUAL – Now, you can read all about it!
February 2008
The last two events in the European programme for mainstreaming EQUAL's
good practices in its Employability Thematic Field took place at the end of last
year. These Policy Fora both looked at diversity, but within different contexts,
and full reports on each are now available.
Discussions in the Paris Forum Sessions
The first conference entitled
"Acting against Ethnic Discrimination in Employment" was held in Paris on 22
and 23 November, whilst the second took place in Belfast exactly one week later
and considered diversity within the context of
Strategies for Empowerment and Inclusion (see 2007 EQUAL NI Conferences).
The events had a number of parallels or similarities and for a start they were
both the culmination of a wider range of activities within an EQUAL
Mainstreaming Platform. In the case of Paris, there had been a
Series of Seminars held in France, Germany and Sweden to present and
validate, at European level, strategic lessons from the experience of EQUAL
Development Partnerships (DPs) that had been active in combating discrimination
in the workplace. The Belfast Forum had been preceded by an
Exchange Event when DPs had developed the messages on diversity and
empowerment and then these messages were refined prior to the Policy Forum, at a
meeting held in Paris.
Each Policy Forum also looked at EQUAL practices from the point of view of
different groupings of actors. As Belfast focussed on empowerment, naturally one
of the groups comprised EQUAL beneficiaries and the other two groups were bridge
builders or, in other words, all those agencies and services involved in the
integration process and, of course, employers. In addressing the issue of ethnic
discrimination, Paris concentrated on the contribution to the promotion of
diversity that could be made by public and private employment services,
employers and their human resource managers, trade unions, non-governmental
organisations, actors from local and regional authorities and the media.
The overall outcomes in Belfast were a set of nine recommendations and Paris
produced five priority issues or lines of action and statements on the potential
role in combating discrimination of each of the six sets of key actors. Whilst
these outcomes were different in character there were some areas of
reinforcement:
Artist Patrick Sanders depicts a slogan from the Belfast event
- Paris proposed that there should be training and capacity building to help
key actors acquire anti-discrimination skills as a professional competence,
whilst, participants in Belfast recommended that training should be provided for
members of staff in the public and the voluntary sectors so that they could
promote a more direct and active involvement of either their clients or those
groupings that they claimed to represent;
- However despite Belfast's implied criticism that the voluntary sector was
sometimes unwilling to relinquish some of its "representative power," both
events recognised the important role played by NGOs in maintaining direct links
with immigrants, ethnic minorities and other diverse groups and in offering
services and support to them;
- Each Policy Forum looked at how more employers could be persuaded to recruit
people from diverse backgrounds through, for example, charters or codes of
conduct or corporate social responsibility. There was a recognition that the
economic potential of a diverse workforce or the "business case" might be the
most effective argument but both fora introduced a caveat to the effect that
diversity should not be perceived exclusively in terms of financial returns, as
it is not always possible to demonstrate its benefits by using economic criteria
alone;
- Finally, in Paris and in Belfast, real concerns were expressed that the
legacy of EQUAL should not be lost and it was suggested that the achievements of
EQUAL in terms of its principles and approaches should be exploited by the 2007
– 2013 ESF Operational Programmes and within the wider framework of national and
EU social inclusion, anti-discrimination and employment policies. In response to
these concerns, certain Member States indicated their willingness to establish
similar platforms under the ESF to extend the work, which each of the two EQUAL
mainstreaming platforms had initiated.
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