THE vile attacks on footballers this week was a grim insight into how racism manifests itself in modern Britain. 

Another is the fact that black and minority ethnic (BME) women are nearly twice as likely as white men to be on zero-hours contracts. 

And yet another is the awful reality that BME workers have been over-represented in jobs with higher Covid-19 death rates. 

Racism harms people in every way, and why should we aim for anything less than an anti-racist Wales? 

Welsh government has laudably done just this, framing its new Race Equality Action Plan as a way to achieve an anti-racist Wales. 

It sets out a really comprehensive set of actions for how all sorts of interventions that it as a government makes in society — from schools and councils, to health boards and social care, and even its role as a large employer — can be geared towards achieving this aim. 

Yes, it is easy to dismiss the Race Equality Action Plan as just another policy document, but the difference here is the extent to which this document has been shaped by BME people throughout Wales. 

The Welsh government has been proactive about learning from BME people’s lived experiences to inform their work in a way I’ve never seen in terms of policy design before. 

But perhaps this is the easiest stage to get right. The next phase is implementation. 

Wales has set itself an enormous challenge by placing a magnifying glass on each and every bit of the public sector, and now it has to actually make changes. And this is where good policy often falls down. 

Frustratingly, I was in a meeting earlier this week where I heard about how a good and (in theory) accessible green policy initiative failed to consider that it was out of reach of many BME people because it didn’t take into account their housing arrangements. 

It illustrates that it is simply not enough to bring lived experience in at the design stage. 

And then we need to consider how we monitor and even enforce the plan’s delivery. 

The problem is that even if we monitor against some of the examples set out above — such as the percent of BME workers on zero-hours contracts — in reality we create perverse policy incentives whereby we would theoretically be satisfied even if they shifted to low-hours contracts and faced virtually the same level of insecurity. 

And is there really any acceptable rate of workers on zero-hours contracts? 

Again, people’s lived experience needs to determine exactly how we monitor and — if it comes to it — enforce the plan, because it is not simply about the plan itself but about creating the reality of an anti-racist Wales. 

The Welsh social partnership model sets us up for this well. Unions bring workers’ lived experiences to the negotiating table and policy debates. 

We represent labour’s interests, we know where workers need vital public health information in different languages, why a policy designed for the NHS risks exploiting workers in the private social care sector, and why the allocation of shifts is one of the ways in which racism manifests itself in the workplace. 

This lived experience of our BME workers needs to continually inform the government’s work. 

But we also need to reflect on how well we do represent BME workers’ interests and experiences, including where they intersect with other forms of prevalent discrimination in the labour market. 

The TUC’s Anti-Racism Task Force has been looking at how we organise, bargain and campaign to secure real change. 

I am proud to be working with colleagues at the TUC and our affiliated unions to take this forward. 

In Wales, I hope that the taskforce’s work dovetails with the implementation of the Race Equality Action Plan, bringing about a step change in activity from both organised labour and the devolved public sector to take us that much closer to an anti-racist Wales. 

I’m not going to fixate on when we might be able to say we’ve got there, but we need to focus on changing those lived experiences of BME people.

Shavanah Taj is general secretary of Wales TUC.