Businesses cannot pretend this is an issue for the government alone: the education system is not the leveller it should be
Class has not had enough attention in the drive for workplace equality. Perhaps thanks to a British preoccupation with this topic, the UK arm of accounting giant KPMG is addressing the deficit. The firm has been analysing its workforce by nosing around what employees’ parents used to do for a living. It’s a legitimate inquiry. The tricky issue is what to do with the answers.
The onus on the oligopolistic financial sector is greater still. Its high pay contributes to broader income disparities. If the opportunity to make big bucks isn’t seen to be available to anyone with talent and drive, legislators will ask why some parts of financial services are allowed to run a semi-closed shop, and government will make life harder through regulation and taxation.
Setting targets, though, heightens the need for a robust methodology. KPMG’s approach is to ask staff to divulge the occupation of their highest-earning parent when they were 14 years old. It then divides parents’ jobs into “professional”, “intermediate” and “working class”, based on an established UK schema. This is far from a perfect measure of socioeconomic background, but it’s still a useful indicator.
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