IEA Editorial and Research Fellow Professor Len Shackleton has written in The Daily Telegraph highlighting a range of unintended negative consequences that could come from proposed legislation to tackle ethnic pay gaps.

Len wrote:

“Mandatory ethnic monitoring will present similar problems with knobs on. As with gender reporting, it will impose substantial monitoring costs and potentially increase ill-feeling among employees. 

“But there are further problems. In order to generate any comparisons at all, people will have to be lumped together under unhelpful categories such as ‘black’, ‘Asian’ or the widely-derided ‘BAME’.

“What is being proposed here is the extension of the principle of equal pay for women based on work of ‘comparable worth’. 

“This is a principle which came from the European Union, but remains embodied in UK law. It is, in essence, a version of the Marxist labour theory of value.”

Read Len’s full piece here.