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This commentary takes the article, “Participation of adults with learning disabilities in the 2015 United Kingdom General Election”, as a jumping-off point for considering a tension between the aim of full and equal equality for all people with disabilities as set out in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and more traditional beliefs, that on occasion, it is necessary to deny legal autonomy of men and women with intellectual disabilities in order to protect them. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This issue is explored by reviewing the multiple and often conflicting ways in which disability and intellectual disability are conceptualised.

Given the multiple and contradictory ways in which both disability and intellectual disability are understood, any discussion of the rights of persons with disabilities is going to be highly problematic.

Equal recognition before the law and the presumption that all persons with intellectual disabilities can – with support – make autonomous decisions could be treated as an empirical question.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

This chapter examines the relationship between constitutional guarantees of sex equality, understood as prohibiting unequal treatment between men and women, and the constitutional protections of maternity. Textual guarantees of sex equality are nearly universal in constitutions around the world, and many constitutions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia also include provisions guaranteeing mothers the special protection of the state. In the United States, by contrast, the special treatment of mothers has long been contested as a threat to gender equality, and the efforts to add a sex equality amendment to the U.S. constitution have failed over the past century because of conflicts about the status of motherhood. This study traces the origins and jurisprudential development of maternity clauses in European constitutions to shed light on the possibility of synthesizing maternity protection with a constitutional commitment to gender equality.

This paper seeks to analyse trade unions’ approaches to equal opportunities in Scotland, focusing on issues of: recruitment of membership from different groups; promoting diversity in post‐holding; and the role of “key equalities issues” in collective bargaining.

The paper draws on in‐depth interviews with equalities officers of 26 unions in Scotland. The analysis takes as its starting point the three models of equality policies identified by Rees: the “sameness”, “difference” and “transformation” models.

The paper argues that, although some equalities officers demonstrated a thorough understanding of the issues, union approaches to equalities in practice reflect the “sameness”, and to some extent “difference”, models: attacking direct discrimination and insisting that members should be treated the same, establishing some limited mechanisms to reflect on the different needs of groups, but being less able to tackle the underlying structural causes of inequality. It is suggested that unions need to develop a more sophisticated analysis of equal opportunities which fully reflects the differences between the experiences of groups of workers and which challenges the fundamental, structural inequalities within (and therefore seeks to transform) organisations and labour markets. A key element of this agenda must be the mainstreaming of equal opportunities within collective bargaining.

Further research is required on how unions are beginning to deal with the issues raised in the paper. The paper is also limited to the views of individual equalities officers – further research on local practice is required.

The findings will be of interest to organisations engaged in equalities work and unions seeking to develop policy and practice in this area.

The paper will add to the literature on unions’ approaches to equalities. It applies the Rees model to extensive new data, and is the first major piece of research to address these issues within the Scottish policy context.

This chapter explores the Slovenian equal opportunities policy in the context of globalization debates. Focusing mainly on the equal opportunities legislation in Slovenia and the other recent European Union (EU) member states, the aim of the chapter is to reflect upon globalization as Europeanization and as supraterritorialization. Supraterritorial processes, such as the second wave of Western feminist movement established a mutual relationship with feminists in the former Yugoslavia during the 1980s. Feminism and the feminist movement in Yugoslavia and in Slovenia in the 1980s and in the beginning of the 1990s, in particular, represent an important basis for gender equality politics and legislation in Slovenia. Another significant element that contributes to the introduction of gender equality legislation is EU integration. In Slovenia and also in other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that recently joined the European Union, the accession played a considerable role in adopting gender equality legislation. Europeanization in the context of equal opportunities policy leads to the homogenization process of standards for gender equality in the EU member states. In terms of legislation in member countries, the Europeanization of gender equality policy is performed as top-down politics particularly in recent member states, such as CEE. Using the example of gender equality policy in Slovenia, this chapter analyzes equal opportunities policy as a concept and as a legal mechanism emerging from the Western tradition, which was directly applied to CEE countries, such as Slovenia, when they joined the EU.

The concept of equality in employment is an elusive one, since it is difficult to visualise the state that would be described with such a concept. Most often, its meaning is taken as self‐ evident and therefore left undefined. (See, for instance, the papers submitted to the Subcommittee on Economic Growth and Stabilisation of the Joint Committees of the Congress of the United States, 1977). Difficulties in attempting to define equality in employment arise from at least four distinct sources: One set of problems stems from the fact that it is hard to envision equality in employment in the overall context of a society that is based on inequality. Utopian thinkers have therefore, traditionally handled the problem of inequality in employment for any given group by equalising all work in its evaluation, and to some degree, in its allocation. (For a modern version that is extremely well thought through see LeGuin, 1974). I will assume that for the purposes of this paper a complete restructuring of society along the lines of overall equality is outside the realm of the possible given the current context and I will therefore not pursue this thought here further.

The subject of part‐time work is one which has become increasingly important in industrialised economies where it accounts for a substantial and growing proportion of total employment. It is estimated that in 1970, average annual hours worked per employee amounted to only 60% of those for 1870. Two major factors are attributed to explaining the underlying trend towards a reduction in working time: (a) the increase in the number of voluntary part‐time employees and (b) the decrease in average annual number of days worked per employee (Kok and de Neubourg, 1986). The authors noted that the growth rate of part‐time employment in many countries was greater than the corresponding rate of growth in full‐time employment.

Draws upon recent legislative changes to Wales to provide new evidence and understanding of the way in which government reforms in the UK have impacted upon the promotion of equality of opportunity at government level. Analyses the problems and challenges that this new legislative duty presents for the elected representatives and bureaucrats as well as the civil groups it was designed to help. Points out a wider significance of these changes and engages the debate about the relationship between government, law and the promotion of equality.