1
A. Marguerite Cassin, Ph.D.
School of Public Administration
Dalhousie University
Canada is a cobbled together country. Differences define us as a country and nation. As a people we combine indigenous peoples and immigrants from all over the world. In the Canadian census, people are invited to identify themselves as Canadians or by national origin.
2 (Insert table) This table makes it is easy to see how social cohesion and identity are national preoccupations in politics, economy, civil society and institutions.
3 Belonging, healing hurts and making equality is the work of our evolving democracy. It is also our work as people as well as citizens.
Making equality is engaging work and Canadians are showing a surprising commitment to equality. There is an increasing array of equality seeking vehicles.
These include negotiated governance arrangements including land claims settlements, resource and revenue sharing and public governments for First
Nations, two founding nation formulation for the place of Quebec in
Confederation, official (French/English) bilingualism in national public institutions, legislated recognition of multiculturalism as a dimension of definition of Canada, assurance of individual rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, legislated human rights at provincial and national levels and national legislation, regulation and programs for workforce inclusion in the form of employment equity. These are only some of our initiatives and it would be easy but most unfortunate to fall into a laudatory polemic about the advanced state of Canadian consciousness and political sophistication.
Equality seeking initiatives in Canada are generally seeking to address historical and ongoing creation of inequality founded in difference and measured in economic, social and political terms. Difference, recognition of difference and reparation of inequality is thematic to our equality initiatives. In various ways, through these and other initiatives, we are seeking ways of creating confidence in or rapport with one another across difference. We are seeking ways of creating rapport in family, community, organizational, economic, political and institutional life and in private economy, social economy, civil society and the state.
Human rights are and have been important and pervasive concepts in formulating inequality in Canada and have an ongoing, influential if often ambivalent place in programs, directions and solutions.
4 The rights approach and with it the institutional vehicles for assuring rights are both accepted and
1 Acknolwedge Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, CEO Mayann Francis
2 refs Stats Canada
3 refs..John Raulston Saul, Kimlica, cdn literature, John Porter
4 place of commissions, complaints controversies, limited and ineffective remedies

controversial in public and economic life and in academic commentary.
5 Rights approaches are in a sense not equality In the absence measured by or founded in violation of human rights.
6 Human rights and the agencies that ensure them are being called upon to address increasingly important and controversial issues, most particularly the systemic ways in which groups of people are marginalized and otherwise sidelined from active participation in civil society, the economy and politics.
In this paper, I am interested in the way in which inequality is conceptualized by human rights. In particular I want to explore the notion of systemic discrimination for its capacity to adequately formulate and direct attention to the discovery of institutional practices that routinely create inequality.
While I am interested in this matter generally, this paper is focused upon workforce participation.
Participation in the workforce is generally regarded as an important dimension of equality. Having a job is important to people. Jobs are a numerically significant basis for livelihoods. They are also important dimensions of social respect, recognition, identity and self esteem. In a society in which many of us have indigenous relations to land, others are three and four generations from ‘frontier life’ and still others recent immigrants, self reliance, initiative and independence are respected and recognized values.
In Canada we have made some progress (albeit uneven) in creating a diverse workforce through employment equity and affirmative action.
7 This progress generally has not been voluntary; it has required legislation, regulation, litigation, challenges to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, human rights activism, business advocacy and the initiation of programs for implementation.
8
As we have diversified the workforce in organizations, through compliance with legislation and regulations, problems in employee relations, workforce management and retention have surfaced. They are expressed in the phenomena of excellent equity records and poor human rights performance in organizations. This is visible in employee retention problems which I have analyzed elsewhere as the revolving door of equity.
9 Figure 1 depicts the revolving door of equity from the perspective of employees of difference.
Insert Fig 1
Workforce equality is more than access to jobs; it is also about receiving recognition for work, gaining advancement and earning the entitlement to
5 Michael ignatief, rights revolution
6 key tension is those differences supported and maintained ..difference among individuals and ultimately we are going to have to address this .. not a matter for this paper.
7 Refs data on workforce participation
8 LEEP, FCP,
9 Cassin

contribute by participating in ‘making’ the norms and values of the workplace.
10
Figure 2 depicts these dimensions of workforce equality.
Insert Fig 2
It is clear that we need more than legislation, regulation and specified programs to make a diverse workforce normal in organizations. We also need ways of understand the challenges. This mean analysis of ‘what goes wrong’.
Both the need for sustained coercive measures and the phenomena of the revolving door of equity tell us about the pervasive and systemic character of the status quo in workforce composition and in the organization and conduct of business and government.
Human rights commissions have been and are important to establishing rights, enforcing legislation and public education. It is useful then to consider the concepts through which human rights establish rights.
Central to human rights concepts of equality and inequality are the notions of individuals and discrimination. The concept of discrimination has been central to the creation of legal and administrable definitions of inequality. Generally the notion of discrimination formulates a domain of action toward persons that treats them as members of groups in ways that are detrimental to their participation in social, economic and political life. The consequences are therefore that they are unable to enjoy their rights and privileges as individuals in a democratic society.
Human rights generally are about assuring the rights of individuals as legal beings in economic, social and political life.
In human rights work, a distinction has been developed between direct discrimination involving actions of individuals and/or groups and indirect discriminat ion in which the ‘system’ is seen to be the perpetrator or cause of discrimination. This notion of indirect discrimination has come to be called systemic discrimination.
Systemic discrimination has been used to conceptualize and explain inequality that arises from generalized institutionalized processes. Systemic discrimination is largely known
, demonstrated and ‘proved’ through results, typically statistical analysis. These include numerical displays of workforce composition, educational achievement, health indicators and more recently systemic selectivity in law enforcement (racial profiling) differentiated by protected group.
While the concept is broadly used, the practices which create or compose systemic discrimination are largely unspecified. This informed vagueness that surrounds how systemic discrimination works now poses serious limitations in our understanding of inequality and our ability to design equality creating
10 Making equality requires more than compliance. It is encouraging to see some organizations taking up equity and workforce participation and innovating approaches to making diverse workforces assets and excellent working environments.

remedies in human rights cases.
11 While we can see increasingly multi dimensional decisions in human rights cases 12 , the reality is that deciders have a limited roster of remedies for successful complainants: financial awards and public recognition. Restoration of jobs for example is rarely ordered generally because of the recognition of the difficulty in making this remedy work. Similarly and to some extent more important remedies for organizations tend to be limited to training, studies, public education and recommendations for further action.
Moreover the uncertainty around systemic discrimination makes it difficult for presenters to argue and demonstrate and deciders to recognize systemic discrimination. In practical terms we do not know how to tell ‘systems’ or the organizations in which they reside to produce different (equality creating) results.
Systemic discrimination poses the idea that differential outcomes are the consequence of systemic practices within organizations and or institutions. For example, workforce composition that is not inclusive of the broader labour market or population is presumed to have systemic discrimination in selection practices.
Similarly, the absence of members of any given group in top jobs is recognized as an instance of systemic discrimination.
Rules 13
Generally, systemic discrimination posits that the routine application of
(organizational) rules creates in inequality in outcome or result. A classic
Canadian example is found in ‘the rotation rule’ applied in banking. Earlier feminist anal ysis of women’s participation in banking shows that women were employed in Canadian banks as tellers, chief tellers and on rare occasion bank administrators.
14 They did not inhabit the ranks of loans officers or bank managers. Further analysis uncovered tha t bank ‘rules’ required that managers rotate to different bank branches across the country and loans officers to various banks within a province or region. In view of the structure of family life and the gendered wage structure, the rotation rule when applied to men and women employees in banks had the effect of differentiating men and women in banking; women were branch employees and men had career advancement opportunities.
The rule was not designed to limit women’s employment.
15 At a time when the career structure provided for entry at teller and advancement to president, the rotation rule assured that senior management at regional and national levels had a range of local experience (rural, urban, different provinces) and banking expertise (consumer and business, administration, employee management). In a large country and in a business that has a large range of customers the rotation
11 For example, the criminal prosecution of a man, found in possession of a kilo of an illegal street drug was dismissed by a judge in Toronto who found that the man, randomly stopped by police, was the subject of racial profiling. These judgements, while on one hand going to the heart of democratic rights, also strain the common sense credibility of concepts of discrimination.
12 Cases in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Alberta
13 Rules is used in a general sense her to mean the procedures, policies and IT embedded routines. which order and pro
14 refs
15 Although it is useful to note that women’s entry into banking (as with many other professions) was as a reserve army of labour. So they were residual from the outset.

rule brought organizational cohesion, rapport among regional and national executives and reliable and informed context based knowledge of businesses and communities essential to the business of banking.
Things in banking have changed and women are an important part of the workforce of at all levels of Canadian banks, although their participation in top jobs remains limited. Feminist analysis, theory and activism, changes in the work organization and business practices of banks, broad legislation and regulation, alteration of wage structures, shifts in expectations of workforce participation of men and women, customer demands and initiatives of women and men
(employees) within banks have all contributed to these changes.
16 The changes that have brought about women’s increased participation in banks are complex and not exclusively the result of changes in the rules. Indeed banks have held tenaciously to rotation as a training ground in some parts of banking, although it is much less significant as their methods of doing business have changed.
Rules as Moments in Regimes
As can be seen in the instance of women in banking, rules are not simply organizationally authorized instructions for doing things. Rather they are part of the fabric of how things are done and how things are known from inside organizations. In this respect they are part of regimes of social action.
17 To see if this conception of systemic discrimination which theorizes a relationship between rules and inequality in outcome or result we need to formulate and specify the relationship. To do this we need to know a lot more about organizations, how they care constructed and how they work.
Knowing Systemic Discrimination
Currently then we ‘know’ that systemic discrimination exists by outcomes and we ‘believe’ it is produced by rules, but we have no methods of thinking or investigation that demonstrate how inequality is brought about by ‘the rules’. This issue is problematized in the following figure
Insert figure 3
The figure shows outcomes depicted as the result of systemic discrimination. It also shows the domain within organization that is believed to cause this result. However that is a black box, we currently are not able to specify connections empirically. The challenge is to be able to show how both the
‘rules’ and everyday organizational experience are connected to produce what we call systemic discrimination.
In some empirical case work analysis work I have been doing, I have had the opportunity to think about this and begin to explore how to specify relationships and practices that we might want to understand as part of creating systemic discrimination.
16 Refs, Account to Settle. One important innovation in advancing women’s participation has been in the
BMO where there has been an executive who has championed women in the bank.
17 Smith, Doroth E.

18
The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission accepted a complaint from three African Nova Scotian men in 1993. These men were among the first men of colour hired as correctional officers at a correctional facility in Nova Scotia 19 . The complaint alleged that they were denied promotion on the basis of race discrimination, including systemic discrimination.
Experience of the Correctional Officer Complainants
These officers had fours sorts of experience they saw as supporting their case:
Racial
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Racial slurs by white correctional officers and inmates over their entire tenure in the correctional facility.
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Workplace incidents between supervisors and these correctional officers that were of a racial nature.
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Loyalty tests (repeated over years) by white correctional officers in which these officers were required to witness and participate in the beating, more general abuse of ‘black’ prisoners, and partial treatment of ‘black’ prisoners.
Racial Incidents
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All experienced racial incidents with supervisors
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Two of the officers made official complaints and sought remedies within the institutions
Health
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All had stress related illnesses which place them on sick leave and disability
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All experienced precipitous decline in their health status over their period of employment.
Work Assignments, Working Abilities, Qualifications and Job Competitions
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All officers had confidence in their working abilities and had ongoing confirmation of this from superiors.

All had qualifications for their position; one officer had baccalaureate education at job entry a qualification which exceeded all but a handful of senior prison officials not only at the outset but over time.

All gained additional job relevant education during their employment at their own expense.

All officers were asked to make use of their race in relationship to
‘black’ prisoners, but received no recognition for this ability, indeed they felt that it worked against them.

Two officers were acting sergeants for more than 12 years. In spite of this neither was appointed permanently to this position, nor were either
18 Case Study refs; acknowledge the Human Rights Commission publication of case study
19 Seven ‘black’ men hired between 1972-1975

of them successful in competitions for positions as correctional officiers in preferred work assignments outside the cell blocks.
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One officer received one promotion to classification officer; his superior reported he was they best classification officer they had; but when he applied for the position of Captain, he lost both competitions.
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All reported experience of partiality and preference for correctional officers known to be ‘favored’ on the part of superiors in awarding education and training, preferred work assignments, more senior positions in the prison.
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While they acknowledged that there were changes in the work and philosophy and there was better administration; it did not make a difference to the racism they felt and experienced.
Institutional Position
The institutional position was quite simple.
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The racial incidents officially reported were acknowledged but official correspondence maintained they were isolated incidents dealt with at the time and the issues had been address and the matters closed.
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It was maintained that as an employer they were compliant with human rights, government policy on diversity and positive action and over time human resources had improved as was demonstrated by the recent hiring or more ‘black’ officers and the promotion of some of these officers.
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They took the view that while there may had been issues in the past these were all resolved. Moreover that management did not support and did not tolerate racist jokes and language and had made this clear to the workforce.
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Promotion was merit based.
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Two officers lacked report writing and related skills and therefore lacked the (merit) qualifications for consideration in a permanent position as sergeant.
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One officer failed in two competitions to be the most meritorious candidate for Captain. One he lost to a better qualified woman. The other he did not reach the top three of the candidate roster in the interview process.
Corridor Accounts
In the investigation interviews with employees and managers (all ’white’) at every level provided experience of the prison. This is a composite of the description.
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Changes in philosophy to rehabilitation changed the work, changed the expectations and increased the value of the job and fairness.
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Most of the people in senior jobs started as correctional officers.
Promotion from within was the way in which people got ‘ahead’.
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There were clear preferences formed for particular people and they were given preferential access to training, preferred work assignments

and other experiences which prepared them and enhanced their opportunity for employment.

Key in gaining notice of senior people was central to gaining preferential treatment. This involved showing initiative that supported managers and the management view of the institution and being neutral toward or unsupportive of the employee union. In particular it was seen as important never to make use of union complaints or other elements of the collective agreement to gain something.
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Most people who got ahead were known to one another through community, school and family connections.
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A few senior people came into the institutions at mid level positions, most in security administration and were ex police or military people with security backgrounds.

Education became increasingly important as the institution changed and leadership qualities rather than brute strength came to be valued.
Contemporary large scale organizations in business and government are managerial in character. This means that they are constructed in and conducted through managerial technologies.
20 Management technologies are systematized and form the key areas of management activity: operations/production, accounting and finance, human resources (employees), marketing and information. Central in how management technologies work is through routine practices, embedded in documents. Documents in organizations are recognized to be critical to ‘recording’ and are taken as evidence of what has been done.
Much less well understood are the ways in which organizational texts are part of creating (as different from documenting) sequences of social action that connect us to one another.
21 This creating of reality through documents is usefully referred to as documentary reality.
22
Rules referred to in notions like systemic discrimination are used in a general sense to mean the procedures, policies and IT embedded routines. What is useful to understand, is what is referred to as rules and encountered by human rights offers investigating complaints as document based procedures and completed forms are part of the work of ordering and providing for action inside organizations. They usefully seen as regimes, since they operate to produce both organizationally created and sanctioned activity as well as accounts.
Status of Accounts: Privileging Management Accounts
20 Cassin, Management Techhnolgogies
21 Smith, Dorothy E.
22 Smith, social Construction of Documentary Reality

The first challenge in discovering and specifying systemic discrimination is in learning how to treat what managers and employees (including complainants tell). The accounts offered managers and employees are generally quite divergent. Managerial accounts show more consistency across managers.
Employee accounts vary and generally describe particulars. A feature of how management organizations work is that managerial accounts are treated as organizational and employee accounts are treated as personal or individual. So in making statements, these disparate accounts are seen to diverge because one group has the privilege of speaking for organizations rather than for themselves.
Employee accounts are treated as telling about employee perceptions or ideas about organization and their experience.
It is important to treat both accounts as organizational accounts. They both arise in organizational experience. They are different because they arise in different experience and locations in the organization. The core in the analysis then is not to sort out which account is true, but rather to sort out where accounts are located, their context and what they can tell us about the organizational practices and how things get done.
Institutional Mapping: Connecting Accounts, Finding Context and
Describing Patterns
Merit and Performance Evaluation
Two set of organizational ‘rules’, merit and performance evaluation are central to how employees gained promotion in the correctional facility. Both are extended sequences of organizational action and are embedded into and create documentary reality.
Performance evaluation is a review of employee work normally over a year. The review is structured by pre established categories which should be viewed as the organizationally relevant features of work performance. Generally practice calls for the review to be conducted by the immediate supervisor of an employee who signs the evaluation. It is discussed with the employee who signs off that he or she has seen the evaluation. The evaluation is then authorized by the senior officer of the institutions. Each party to the evaluation can offer remarks. The evaluation enters the employee’s personnel file retained by the organization.
In the performance evaluations of one of the complainants, supervisors were generally very positive about the performance of the complainant. The senior officer however commented to make it clear that the employee lacked abilities and attributed this to his poor education and background. Taken overall and in context, the comments made by the senior officer in the evaluation make race (poor education and background) relevant to abilities.
Merit is the principle of hiring in the public sector. It poses that people are hired on the basis of merit, defined as ability, qualifications and personal suitability (rather on the basis of political affiliation).
23 As well as being a principle, it is operationalized in a selection process which is part of a management
23 refs Cassin, Hodgett et. And PSC website

technology in human resources management. Merit is not, contrary to popular a characteristic of individuals. Rather it is an attribution to a person as organizationally relevant capacities are ‘uncovered’ in a competitive selection process. When employees apply for positions internally, the performance evaluation is taken into account in vetting their applications. The performance evaluation documents the employee as lacking and when entered to the initial assessment disqualifies the employee as a candidate because these abilities are part of the minimum qualifications for the position. We can see then that race influenced evaluations are then migrated through different organizational events through the documentary order.
It is useful to realize then that the employee whose performance evaluation is analysed here, believed t hat he was being ‘held back’ by the senior officer and that there was something ‘racial’ in the performance evaluation. He was quite correct in context, he just did not know how the document practices worked. The point then is that both account people give and documents need to be located in contexts and the organizational connections tracked and mapped.
Social and Organizational Context for Accounts
Once we can see how performance appraisal and merit works then we can begin to look at the racial slurs and incidents to see that they create a climate in which race is present; it is racialized. This is created as work as people bring the larger social practices and values to work. It is important to see the slurs and incidents as both individual and systematic.
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We have come to call this a poisoned work environment. The notion of poisonous work environment is useful in describing and locating the debilitating effects of these sorts of behaviour on people. It is not as useful at drawing attention to what racialized environments achieve and how this is done. To see this we have to look at difference and inequality.
It is a truism that inequality is not the direct consequence of difference; we are all individuals and thus different from one another. Socially, inequality is created as difference is taken into account and made relevant such that it counts in economic, social, and political life, in civil society and personal identity and self esteem.
Racialized Environment: Inside/Outside
Racial slurs and jokes when practiced and tolerated by others (‘white’ and
‘black’, with agreement or not) create a normative work environment in which race is made relevant. A racialized environment within prison was created by the
‘activists’ as well as the ‘pacifists’. Critical to see this is created in interaction as corrections officers related to one another and as prisoners slurs were tolerated.
Within the working environment the incidents between correctional officers and superiors ‘in heated moments’ tell of the generalized environment in which
24 refs and comment on social workers stories and article ‘Mommy, Mommy There’s a Nigger at the Door’

people know how to make race relevant. This knowledge is imported and created at work and is systemic in the society and created at work. Making race relevant is a learned method of attribution.
The cre ated environment is then present and ‘at the ready’ as it were for use in a variety of organizational events, including performance evaluation and the attribution of merit discussed earlier. It is intensified with use. The practices are undermining and stress creating for people of colour who are singled out for special treatment as race is made relevant. It is pervasive throughout their experience and creates an ongoing sense of ‘other’. Ultimately it was expressed in a decline in health of these officers.
We can see then the connection then between jokes and slurs, daily working experience, incidents, performance appraisal, merit and promotion and see the kind of work that gets done as we map out the relationships and practises.
Preferential Environment:
Exactly the same processes are at work in creating the preferential environment described by complainants and corridor informants. Managers normalize the preference for a narrow form of behaviour as the ‘right stuff’
(shared values and aspirations). They recognize it in people and use their organizational prerogative to provide the experience, education and training and preferred work assignments to building up experience which is then entered into performance evaluation and merit assessments. These forms also build the confidence and self esteem of people entered into the process so that they perform well on interviews and display what is recognized as leadership qualities.
In this process of creating the preferential environment, the qualities of leadership and the recognition and performance acknowledged by peers only count when it is part of the larger framework. So for example the complainants were very well respected by the majority of their peers and supervisors and had a lot of practical leadership experience through community activity. The environment of race and preference made it impossible to bring these into play as assets in competition for advancement, but of course were essential to retention, that is staying on the job.
Preliminary Conclusion
This paper explores some of the practices of creating inequality systemically. It uncovers practices of management, authority structures, professional standards, cultural and educational preference and union agreements that combine with common sense, community patterns and everyday interaction to form routine regimes of exclusion and inclusion. These create what we have come to call systemic discrimination. These routine regimes form the practices through which both inequality and privilege are created.
Further drafts and related work: marguerite.cassin@dal>ca