Council slated for advertising jobs to ethnic minorities

Bristol City Council has been accused of racism after advertising two vacancies open only to black and minority ethnic graduates.

Bristol Council has created the positions in a bid to recruit more ethnic minority applicants. However, the move has prompted criticism, with one anonymous jobseeker telling the Daily Mail the advertisement was “totally racist”.

The advert states: “Open to Black and minority ethnic graduates”.

A spokesperson for the council said:

"This is the third year of running the traineeship and it was started because of the marked under-representation of ethnic minority people in the council's workforce.

"The normal recruitment process was not rectifying this unacceptably low trend so there was a strong case for this small positive recruitment traineeship for two ethnic minority graduates a year.

"We have a workforce of more than 9,000 employees, excluding school staff, so this is a small training programme.

"Graduates from any ethnic background are open to apply for the national graduate local government programme which we recruit from every year – we have just recruited two graduates in this way."

Olivia Sinfield, an Associate Solicitor at PJH Law, commented:

“In our current pre-Equality Act existence broadly speaking, positive discrimination is not permitted.  Employers can, only in very limited circumstances, use positive action to help or encourage a candidate from a particular group to apply.  Employers may discriminate positively in favour of a particular racial group to afford that group access to training provided that certain conditions are met in that workplace in the preceding 12 months.  Presumably Bristol City Council are relying on these provisions of the Race Relations Act.

“In the post-Equality Act world of October 2010, employers will, in theory, be able to favour under-represented groups during the recruitment process provided the candidates are of ‘equal suitability’. Without wanting to pour cold water on this before it even becomes law, we are not convinced this will result in much practical change.

“Cases from the ECJ suggest that preference can only be given where candidates have ’substantially equivalent merits’.  However, it is not clear in what circumstances merits will be seen as being ’substantially equivalent’.  There will always be distinctions between candidates' experience and abilities and it will be a brave employer who runs the gauntlet in trying to  argue ‘equal suitability’ given the risk of a costly discrimination award. Time will tell.”