The Equal Opportunities Revolution

At the start of the decade no employer had heard of an "equal opportunities policy" - by the end three-quarters of all those in work were covered by one. That was the 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher's government were known for their backward-looking stance on race, women and labour law. But it was under their rule, all the same, that the greatest advances in race and sex equality in the workplace were made.

This is the story of the "equal opportunities revolution" at work. Not a handbook or a guide but a history of a sea-change in the workplace, drawn from contemporary sources.

The equal opportunities revolution was hatched in the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Race Equality and the London Labour boroughs. At the time the policies they came up with were often rubbished from the left as tokenism, and from the right as social engineering. But over time 'equal opps' were taken up by employers as best practice.

This account 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 explains how.