white horse's wet dream

oldvicar

oldvicar wrote: »

It seems there are some strong views on the role of diversity co-ordinators.

I don't know if our local council has one. Can anyone tell me what their job is?

ILW wrote: »

Prmarily to put minority interest groups to the front of the queue rather than employing the best person for the job.

A._Badger wrote: »

To ensure that the street theatre co-ordinators, five-a-day counsellors and real nappy awareness advisers are properly representative of the GLBT, Black, Asian, Traveller and other 'communities' of course!

Cleaver wrote: »

That isn't the purpose of diversity in the workplace.

Thanks for your views.

What has really surprised me is the apparent consensus that the role is internal to the organisation, as a sort of additional HR function. I had genuinely presumed that in some way they were focussed on the community, although thinking about it I suppose that historically that sort of diversity has just happened without needing to be co-ordinated.

Spirit_2

ILW wrote: »

Prmarily to put minority interest groups to the front of the queue rather than employing the best person for the job.

Very little positive action going on....using the NHS as an example.... increasing numbers of Black and Minority Ethnic Drs, very small proportion of BME senior nurses or Therapists though.

If I were a very able BME health professional I would like to be confident I had an equal chance of of getting promotion based on merit.

Spirit_2

oldvicar wrote: »

Thanks for your views.

What has really surprised me is the apparent consensus that the role is internal to the organisation, as a sort of additional HR function. I had genuinely presumed that in some way they were focussed on the community, although thinking about it I suppose that historically that sort of diversity has just happened without needing to be co-ordinated.

I tend to agree, it is not internal and should not be an HR function, but mostly taking account of the needs of the communities that the organisation serves. Plenty of evidence that minority communities have worse health outcomes.

Road_Hog

Ilya_Ilyich wrote: »

So should we send the darkies back where they came from or just make sure they don't have access to meaningful jobs? This is important!

You Marxists are all the same. I make a comment about cutting the bloated public sector that we can't afford and you equate it to racism. The standard Lefty socialists response, try to tar the opponent to end any debate.

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

And that's what has happened.

vivatifosi

oldvicar wrote: »

It seems there are some strong views on the role of diversity co-ordinators.

I don't know if our local council has one. Can anyone tell me what their job is?

Do you employ anyone with diversity in their title and if so how much are they paid? This/variants of it is one of the most asked questions of any government body. A lot of government departments have disclosure logs on their website which show the questions asked and answered. If yours don't, you can always google: "xxx council" FOI (or freedom of information) diversity.

Cleaver

Spirit wrote: »

If I were a very able BME health professional I would like to be confident I had an equal chance of of getting promotion based on merit.

Well, I think you've highlighted the problem - people from a BME background don't have an equal chance of promotion based on merit. Once you get to senior clinical or management roles it's a sea of white faces - it's basically institutional racism. And I'm basing that on fact, not opinion. But I agree with others that appointing a mass of Equality and Diversity Coordinators, whilst well meaning, is not going to solve this problem.

I think we need to remember that equality and diversity shouldn't just be about looking internally at the organisation, it should be about looking externally at customers and service users.

Cleaver

Road_Hog wrote: »

You Marxists are all the same. I make a comment about cutting the bloated public sector that we can't afford and you equate it to racism. The standard Lefty socialists response, try to tar the opponent to end any debate.

I understand your point, but a public sector organisation who employs someone effective in an equality and diversity role should do so with the objective of saving money over the long term. A good example is a lot of the work done adapting health services in East London to better fit ethnic minorities in the area. By doing so it has meant that a lot of diseases and issues can be dealt with at an early stage, so we see cheaper prevention rather than expensive cure. There's a good case study of a breast care service that started taking equality and diversity very seriously and saved the tax payer a tonne of money - it was all about understanding their local population and engaging them in early prevention, thus negating the need for as many expensive surgical procedures and courses of radiotherpay. They did this by employing someone in an equlity and diversity type of role to adapt the service.

As above though, I agree that some organisations must employ E&D coordinators in useless roles because they feel they should have one. Having said this, I've worked for four public sector organisations and none of them had an Equality and Diversity-specific member of staff.

Cleaver

oldvicar wrote: »

What has really surprised me is the apparent consensus that the role is internal to the organisation, as a sort of additional HR function. I had genuinely presumed that in some way they were focussed on the community, although thinking about it I suppose that historically that sort of diversity has just happened without needing to be co-ordinated.

A very good point, and I refer to the fact that it should be external looking in my post above. To be clear, the purpose of a decent equlity and diversity role is nothing to do with ensuring that you have some weird mix of people of different colours, or recruitment of black people only, or anything else like that. Of course that happens sometimes, and it's what the Daily Mail would like you to think, but it shouldn't be about that. And isn't in many organisations.

Cleaver

grizzly1911 wrote: »

From my knowledge of the NHS it isn't the clinicians that are the problem, more the guys in suits with clipboards, forever reinventing the wheel, to justify their own existence. The clinicians are often ensuring they jump through the next set of hoops for that new wheel.

I love this idea that the NHS is made up of wonderful clinicians on the one side and suit wearing managers on the other. The past twenty years has seen each clinical body, whether that's doctors, nurses, physios, radiographers, pharmacists or anyone else, pushing and screaming for more advanced roles in their profession. Basically, every profession in the clinical side of the NHS has 'professionalised' their staff.

When you see someone with their 'clipboard and suit' in the NHS it could very well be a former radiographer who has now been appointed as a 'Radiographer Patient Pathway Manager' and has been appointed in to that role by the Radiography department who are busy creating management roles for their former clinical staff. This happens in nursing and all other professions too. Don't get me wrong, the NHS is management heavy. But it's managers in all areas, clinical and non-clinical. Have a look at any trust and see how many nurse managers they have (i.e. trained nurses who have moved in to nursing management positions) compared to straight nurses and I bet you'll be shocked.

As an aside, having worked in the NHS I only ever saw nurses and doctors with clipboards as they often use them for patient notes.

Road_Hog

Cleaver wrote: »

I understand your point, but a public sector organisation who employs someone effective in an equality and diversity role should do so with the objective of saving money over the long term.

I picked one example, don't get too hung on it. It's a bit like if someone wanted to use a racist organisation, they use the BNP (I'm not making any personal comment on the BNP, merely an example).

There are many other jobs like that, where the needs of the minority are put over the needs of the majority. The real problems are also that councils and other public sectors have become politicised, which is very wrong. I'll dig up the example if I can find it, but councils are cutting frontline services (headline) like elderly care homes, which make the headlines, whilst employing more people like E&D co-ordinators. The Telegraph did a study on Haringey council, and they had cut every thing from care homes, meals on wheels to libraries etc, but had not cut any E&D staff, any management, executives or other back room staff.

It's the same as if an individual lost all their over time or had reduced hours, they'd make sure they paid the mortgage and cut out the mid week trips to the pub etc. The councils are doing the equivalent of not paying their mortgage and still going down the pub whilst shouting, look I'm being made homeless by these cuts.

We have real problems with our countries finances and they're not being tackled. When things don't get sorted at the start we store up problems. Public sector pensions are one that has been brewing since the '90s, 25 - 28% of council tax collected (not business rates) goes merely to paying public sector (council) pensions and I don't mean building a pot like private sector pensions, I mean merely managing to pay the existing pensions. That is why council tax keeps going up every year.

Then we have services cut that we need, like weekly bin collections. I love getting a bin full of maggots during the summer, no matter how tightly I keep the bin shut and tie the bags. And for those that are about to hark on about the recycling and it being good, you're being conned. Most of the stuff can't be financially recycled, mainly just the metal. We're doing the recycling because of the EU and one of their directives, but here's the rub. The directive says that a certain percentage of household waste has to be collected for recycling. It is not measured on how much is actually recycled and therefore all those nice bits of stuff you sort out into different containers every week is still going into landfill, but we're paying to have it collected as recycling even though it isn't.

It's endemic how our money is collected and wasted. Like road tax, seen the state of the roads and the patch job repairs, especially when we have a frost. That's because only 25% of road tax is actually spent repairing roads. If I were to run a business on our public sector model, I'd go bankrupt pretty soon, of yes, that is actually what is happening to the country.

There's a good video on Youtube that shows the growing size of the public sector, it was something like 10% at the turn of the last century, it is now about 52%.