Discrimination

Researchers and activists have identified three types of discrimination – individual, institutional, and structural or systemic discrimination. All are important areas for unions to work with. We need to be skilled at recognising discrimination that may be visible, hidden, or invisible.

Individual discrimination lies within individuals. It is a private manifestation of societal power relationships. Examples include prejudice, xenophobia, internalised racism, sexism, classism, and privilege and beliefs about race, gender and class influenced by the dominant culture. It can include individuals accepting things as they are and thus colluding with social injustice. Internalised sexism, racism and classism describe the way we absorb social messages about injustice and adopt them as personal beliefs, biases, and prejudices. This can involve believing in negative messages about oneself or one’s group. Internalised privilege can involve the feeling of a sense of superiority and entitlement and the holding of negative beliefs about other groups.

Meritocracy is the idea that power and privilege have been given to certain people who have worked hard individually. Lack of power and privilege is due to personal failure rather than social and institutional constructs such as race, class, gender, or other oppression. It is often used to blame workers, women, or racialised peoples for the discrimination they face and minimise or deny oppression.

Institutional discrimination refers to the ways in which policies and practices of institutions such as schools, mass media, corporations, organisations, governmental agencies, and even trade unions create different outcomes for different groups in education, housing, prisons and policing, immigration, employment, our health and the health of the land and environment. The policies and institutions may often operate silently to maintain the status quo and advantage the privileged.

Structural or systemic discrimination encompasses the entire system of oppression, diffused, and infused in all aspects of society, including our history, culture, politics, economics and our entire social fabric and thus self-reinforcing. Structural discrimination is the most profound and pervasive form of discrimination – all other forms of discrimination (such as institution, interpersonal, internalised, …) emerge from structural discrimination. Structural discrimination is by its very nature locked-in, difficult to eradicate and self-reproducing.

Centuries of inequities deeply imbedded in our societies mean that institutions with seemingly “universal” or “race-neutral” or “gender-neutral” policies have a powerful effect on reproducing and entrenching inequality.” To reduce inequities, we need solutions that are not “neutral”, but that correct the historical and institutional discriminatory practices of capitalism and colonialism that have held workers back.

As union members we are familiar with fighting structural and systemic oppression and why it is important. When public attention is given to racism, sexism, or other forms of oppression, it is often focused only on individual symptoms (such as a racist or sexist slur by an individual) rather than the structural systems of oppression. This mistakenly leads us into discussions about whether an individual is a good or bad person, rather than focusing on the work needed to correct pervasive structural and collective problems.

As trade unionists, we cannot condone individual acts of sexism, racism, homophobia, or any form of social injustice. Understanding of the nature of structural oppression allows us to understand why it is so important to interrupt individual and personal acts of discrimination and prejudice, because they are not one-off occurrences, but are rather linked to deeply harmful societal oppression.

Intersectionality is a term developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw over thirty years ago to describe the intersections where multiple forms of oppression come together. For example, a Black woman worker does not experience gender inequalities in the same way as a white woman worker, nor racial oppression identical to that experienced by a Black male worker. Each race, gender and class intersection produces a qualitatively distinct social space. When unions don’t have a critique of racism and sexism and only focus on class, we are not able to address how workers live at the intersections of other oppressions.

Intersectionality is particularly important to trade unionists because of the intersection of class with other oppressions. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality developed from her study of a discrimination lawsuit filed by African-American women at General Motors. Prior to 1964, General Motors did hire women, but only Whites. The company also hired African Americans, but only men. A seniority-based layoff during the 1970s resulted in the layoff of all black women workers, since they were all hired after 1964. The African-American women lost their legal case because, although the law recognised gender discrimination and racial discrimination separately, it refused to recognise the existence of both gender and race discrimination together.

Intersectionality can create challenges for movements, including labour movements, that are organised to see each oppression as separate and individual. As the European Centre for Intersectional Justice puts it, “[w]ithin the category “woman”, migrant women, women with disabilities, or Roma women may be at a higher risk of systemic discrimination and tend to be excluded from a (union) gender equality policy focused solely on “gender” as the main dimension.”… In Europe, “the omission of race in the discourse about discrimination has distorted … intersectionality and the absence of robust data relevant to race has exacerbated the challenges of bringing race to the forefront of intersectionality work in Europe”. The studies that have been done show that “across the EU, people of African descent face widespread and entrenched prejudice and exclusion.”

As workers we experience discrimination in a multitude of forms. Each of us is or has been a member of both dominant and subordinate groups. We are oppressed as workers, and we may hold privileges within the working class as White, male, straight, by religion, nationality, language, or migration status, or as able-bodied workers. Each one of us experiences both privilege and oppression in different and unique ways in our lives.

To explore intersectionality, we need to look at the many ways that oppression and discrimination operate. Oppression happens when dominant groups benefit at the expense of subordinates, supported by social institutions and power structures. For example, in our social structures, men dominate over women, adults over youth and children, heterosexual over queer people and of course, the owning class over the working class.

Some common patterns and characteristics of dominate and subordinate groups are listed below.

Silence and implicit bias are common ways discrimination is supported. In addition to the people who verbally, physically and consciously engage in sexist or racist attacks, there are many of us who collude with, minimise and support injustice with silence.

In the words of Joseph Bendigo, a student leader, “[a]n attitude of denial is dangerous. It inhibits our ability to learn from what happened. Our silence in the face of jokes and passing comments gives permission for hateful remarks to be made publicly. Silence camouflages the genuinely hateful and empowers them in the development of their beliefs. Our silence fosters hate. Our silence enables the hateful to feel comfortable and welcome.”

When individuals are silent or in denial about the same things, it forms a culture of silence and denial. The more that institutions and individuals can speak publicly and act to counter injustice, the better for all of us.