Lawyer Eugene Johnston says black workers are being kept “under the feet of employers” as they aren’t motivated enough to speak up for their rights.Mr Johnston has accused Bermuda’s workplaces of being “elitist institutions” which have the “particular purpose” of treating blacks and whites differently. He told a public forum on employment that apathetic Bermudians were allowing themselves to be treated “like slaves”.Mr Johnston said blacks were still labelled as “criminals and good for nothings” so they needed to show their collective fighting spirit to improve working conditions. He told the crowd: “It’s really not good enough … Rather than playing with your shackles, you should take them off and throw them away”.Mr Johnson gave his passionate speech to about 200 people as one of the panel members at the event at Warwick Workman’s Club on Thursday evening. He said Bermuda had “sold its own down the river” but people didn’t seem to care as they were “too busy playing the other people’s games”.Mr Johnston said: “The employer has a value structure and you fit under his feet.“We haven’t asked the right questions, we have been weak and we have been acting like slaves”.Mr Johnston said he wrongly assumed he would return to Bermuda after university and “be able to save the whole planet one case at a time”.He admitted he quickly realised he had to “operate within a system and that system was not suited to what you thought you could do with your education”.Mr Johnston said: “We expect to be pioneers of business in our own country. You go away to get an education but you soon realise there is something tragically wrong with our system … the system is broken. You realise that you are just not valued the same as everyone else. You are doing your work as good as the others but sometimes they like you and sometimes they don’t”.Mr Johnston blamed workplace discrimination on the “vast majority” of children being brought up without having the initiative to question things.He said Bermuda’s young people were no longer “creating ideas” or “dreaming and achieving their dreams”.Mr Johnston said: “It’s like everything is okay in the world and all we have to do is fit into it.“We motivate no one … we have decided to leave everything in place as it is and just go along to get along. We have to climb out of this hole … but we decide to run to the side of the hole rather than climb out”.But Mr Johnston urged the crowd that now was the time to “take responsibility” and start to question rather than accept working conditions.He said if people collectively started to make some noise then “things would improve very quickly”.Mr Johnston said: “You have to change your thinking. It’s simply unacceptable that we have a situation where people still can’t find jobs. It’s also unacceptable that we accept and create any excuse to allow others to get one over on us.”He urged people to “find the elevator or staircase” to get them out of where they were stuck, adding that it’s “just not true” that Bermudians are bad workers. Mr Johnson also highlighted how Bermuda’s Employment law “should be strengthened”. He said: “It’s terrible and awful to navigate as a lawyer”.