A substantial part of the Enlightenment was that we should use logic and reason to divine public policy rather than the supposed claims of the divinity of your choice. It’s not obvious that this idea has stuck:
Despite having hired an ethnically diverse workforce that often reflected the population they served, Sainsbury’s store managers were, in most cases, all white men. “And it wasn’t just me that was concerned about it. Naturally, the executive management were concerned as well,” Tyler says.
It sparked a series of initiatives, including management development schemes, unconscious bias training and recruitment programmes, which also focused on senior leadership, resulting in Sainsbury’s appointing the first black woman – Jean Tomlin – to its board in 2013.
By the time he stepped down in 2019, Tyler felt they had made a difference. “It’s much easier for, say, a young woman from an ethnic minority arriving in one of our stores to see that it’s possible for her to get to the top today than it was then. And that’s really important, as far as I’m concerned.”
As with Gary Becker on taste discrimination. Not hiring talent - or not allowing talent to flourish - on spurious grounds like ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality and so on is costly to an employer. Therefore the competition in the marketplace for access to talent will break down discrimination in hiring on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality and all the rest. In fact, so strong is this impulsion that if maintenance of such discrimination is desired - say, because the ruling class is obscenely racist - then it will be necessary to use the law to insist upon it. Thus Jim Crow, for that insistence on not being allowed to hire talent, wherever it is, is the only thing which will stop business from profiting from hiring talent.
We’re entirely fine with that work within the supermarket chain therefore. Obviously we are, it accords with our beliefs and you can’t gain greater proof than that, can you?
But then:
It is one of the reasons that Tyler, who now chairs the government-backed Parker review into ethnic diversity, has broadly welcomed new regulations that will, for the first time, force the UK’s roughly 1,100 publicly listed companies to show that they are meeting gender and ethnic diversity targets – or explain why they are falling behind.
This is where the logic and reason part come in. If we assume that the performance of Sainsbury’s is increased by that access to talent then we’ve no need for the insistence of the law that all do it.
As an aside, Sainsbury’s shareholders should be a little miffed that their former chairman is now whittling away at their competitive advantage by insisting everyone else adopt their winning policy.
But logic, reason: if hiring diversely increases profits then we’ve no need of a law to hire diversely because capitalism and markets - good old greed if you prefer - will lead to diverse hiring. The only possible justification for the law about hiring diversely is that it is not more profitable therefore there is no other impulse which will lead to it.
Do note something here. There could well be other reasons why we might want the law. That logical, reasoning, process does allow us to nibble away at an argument piece by piece. So this is about exactly that piece being presented.
If diversity increases profits then we need no law about it, if we do need a law about it then it cannot be true that the profit justification is valid. QED.
Our suspicion is that those proposing this argument know all of this. But it still acts as some vaguely convincing handwavey stuff that justifies what they already wish to do. Which is fine, obviously, folk get to do as they wish - but it’s not exactly a strong defence of those Enlightenment virtues of logic and reasoning, is it?