EU institutions must lead ‘societal shift’ on racism, says equality commissioner

The European Commission will collect data on the ethnicity of its staff for the first time as part of an effort to make the workforce more diverse and lead an EU push to be “collectively anti-racist,” according to a new action plan to combat racism.

Helena Dalli, the equality commissioner, unveiled the EU executive’s plan Friday to bring about a “societal shift” on the issue of racism following the global outcry against discrimination in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by police in the United States.

“We need to become collectively anti-racist, we need a societal shift,” Dalli said at a press conference to present the anti-racism action plan — A Union of Equality — with Věra Jourová, the commissioner for values and transparency. “We need to address microaggressions like we need to address structural racism and discrimination.”

The 26-page plan includes enhanced monitoring of the transposition of the Racial Equality Directive into national law. But most strikingly, the document includes proposals to make the EU’s conspicuously white workforce more diverse. Those include the creation of an office to promote diversity and inclusion, data on the diversity of Commission staff as well as “mandatory training” for personnel on unconscious bias.

“We are also taking an introspective look within the Commission’s services and we will be working to ensure that our staff is reflective of society in its diversity,” Dalli said.

Earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in her first State of the Union speech that the EU would appoint the Commission’s “first-ever anti-racism coordinator” to fight unconscious bias among “people, institutions and even in algorithms.”

Back in June, the Commission president had bluntly confronted the lack of diversity in EU institutions during a speech in the European Parliament. “Let us look around here in this very hemicycle,” von der Leyen said. “The diversity of our society is not represented, and I will be the first to admit that things are not better in the College of Commissioners or among the European Commission staff. And this is why I say we need to talk about racism, and we need to act.”

According to the European Network Against Racism, which was set up in 1998 to “achieve legal changes at European level,” racial and ethnic minorities make up at least 10 percent of the European Union population. But there are only 24 non-white MEPs out of 705.

The Commission’s plan intends to set up a new human resources strategy with a Diversity and Inclusion Office that will act as “a one-stop-shop for all experts and services that contribute to advancing diversity, equality and inclusion across all Commission departments.”

It also proposes to collect data on the diversity of the Commission’s more than 33,000 staff via a voluntary and anonymous survey on diversity and inclusion. “The survey will cover all categories of staff, and target all possible grounds of discrimination including data on racial and ethnic origin of the staff, in full compliance with data protection rules,” the text said. Such a survey has never been conducted before, in line with French legal bans on collecting these kinds of statistics.