The Equal Opportunities Revolution

About The Equal Opportunities Revolution

At the start of the 1980s no employer had heard of an “equal opportunities policy” – by the end three-quarters of all those in work were covered by one. This is the story of the “equal opportunities revolution” at work. It explains why bosses took equal opportunities on board just as they were tearing up union rights at work. It asks why greater rights led to greater inequality, and why advances in race and sex equality ran alongside social inequality. It shows how the equal opportunities revolution became the general model for workplace relations in the decades that followed, and how it did not challenge, but rather perfected the liberalisation of labour law. The right won the economic war, the left won the culture war – and this book explains how.