The arrival of global tech firms and other international companies, bringing with them and attracting people of various nationalities, races and cultures, has been a factor in increasing Ireland’s ethnic diversity. But is racism something people of colour, be they Irish or newer arrivals, have to contend with in the workplace?
Dr Ebun Joseph, the founder of the Institute of Antiracism and Black Studies who also established the first black studies module in UCD, supports and advises people facing racism. She is clear: racism is rife in Ireland.
“A lot of ethnic minorities face inequalities in the workplace,” she says. “No single sector is free of this. From medical doctors and nurses to people flipping burgers, IT support, banking – everywhere. It is rampant.
“I think we should come to a place that we can all agree there is racism in Ireland. People think racism is only in America but it’s happening here. The reason we don’t think we have the same problems that we see in America is because people of colour are in all strata in America but in Ireland they’re only in the bottom strata. The places we see conflict in Ireland are at the bottom of the ladder because that’s where the people with visible differences are.”
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In her role, Joseph has come across many examples of people facing discrimination purely because of their skin colour.
“A young person, about 27, was working in a factory for a month,” she recounts. “One day she got to work and her line manager called her and said that she hadn’t met her target. The woman said she’d been working on it but she’s only been there a month and others don’t meet the targets as well.
“The manager said, this is not about them, it’s about her – and they have to let her go. They didn’t have any training in place to support her reaching these targets. As the woman told her colleagues what was happening, the line manager walked to her table, made her close up all her belongings and leave immediately.”
The woman was understandably shocked, says Joseph; she felt like she had been treated like a criminal.
Another person reported to Joseph that she got a job in which employees needed a pin number to access documents.
“For the entire two months or so she was there she wasn’t given access to the pin and people coming in after her were. She had to ask colleagues for pin numbers in order to access the documents required to do her role.”
It was, she says, another case of blatant discrimination in the workplace.
‘Organisational culture’
In order for change to happen, we need to monitor such occurrences, Joseph says. “When people report racism in the workplace we need to take it seriously and not blame it on ‘a bit of banter’,” she adds. “What is the condition of the organisation that makes it possible for this sort of racism to happen? It’s not just an event between two people – they’re not just reporting the person who did the racist act; it’s an organisational culture that allows these acts to happen. Businesses need to review processes and culture that allow events like this to happen.”
Tackling workplace racism is not something that can be done “in word only”: to have real effect, it requires action.
People of colour are not adequately represented across all levels of industry, which is part of the problem, Joseph argues. “We need to look at HR,” she says. “It comes from recruitment. We need to look at how jobs are being advertised and how HR is selecting people to move forward for these roles.”
Protections needed
For meaningful change, measures must be put in place to protect people reporting racist incidents from any backlash. “If people are protected, they’ll report more,” Joseph says.
Worrying, in her experience, younger people are less likely to report such workplace racism. “The younger you are, the less likely you are to report,” she adds. “And it’s not because these incidents aren’t happening – [younger workers] want to belong; they are trying to build their careers and it’s important to them what people think. They are less inclined to report something because, then, you go into the bad books. They want to be liked and progress so they don’t report.”