Dave Smith: Blacklist Support Group Opening Statement for Undercover Policing InquiryArchived Message
Posted by sashimi on November 18, 2020, 9:21 pm
17 November, 2020
(quote) In 1919, ex-military intelligence officers together with Conservative MPs and the captains of British industry set up the Economic League, to wage in their own words 'a crusade for capitalism' by keeping left wing union activists under surveillance and denying them work. The Economic League had both direct formal and (countless) informal links with the police, that resulted in thousands of workers losing their jobs in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, mining, engineering, banking and local government.
The Inquiry will find that after the Economic League closed down in 1993, Cullum McAlpine, a director of Sir Robert McAlpine Limited bought part of the Economic League blacklist to set up a new organisation called The Consulting Association. This secret body was comprised of major construction companies including; Balfour Beatty, Laing O'Rourke, Costain, Skanska, Kier, Bam, Vinci, AMEC and AMEY. It illegally orchestrated the blacklisting of construction workers and appointed a former Economic League employee, Ian Kerr, as Chief Executive. Files were kept on 3213 individuals, which included their name, national insurance number, address, photograph, phone number, car registration, information about their medical history and family members.
When a blacklisted worker was elected as a union representative, raised concerns about safety on a building site, submitted an employment tribunal or took part in a protest, this was recorded on his or her blacklist file. Every job applicant on major building projects, had their name checked against the blacklist and if there was a match, the worker would be refused work or dismissed. Each name check cost £2.20, the last set of invoices for Sir Robert McAlpine alone, when the company was building the Olympic Stadium was for £28,000. This is not a few managers chatting after work. This is industrial scale systematic blacklisting of union activists.
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In the 1990s I worked, and was a union safety rep, on the Jubilee Line Extension, and some of my fellow workers who took part in a safety dispute over the lack of fire alarms at London Bridge station ended up being blacklisted. Some of those blacklisted workers took their own lives. No one can say that blacklisting was the sole reason for these suicides, but prolonged periods of unemployment and family tensions cannot be good for anyone's mental health.
Blacklisting is also responsible for workers' deaths in another way. When union safety reps are repeatedly sacked just for highlighting unsafe working conditions such as asbestos, electrical safety or poor scaffolding, that sends out a message to other workers on site. It creates a climate of fear where other workers keep their heads down rather than speak up. The conscious blacklisting of safety reps is undoubtedly a contributory factor in the appalling workplace fatality rates in construction, the sector with consistently the highest number of deaths of any major industry in the UK.
Parliament was so outraged by the Consulting Association that as a direct consequence it introduced the Blacklisting Regulations 2010. A select committee investigation into Blacklisting in Employment published seven reports and called blacklisting a "real live conspiracy"In 2016, a High Court trial was settled when the UK's biggest building firms made a public apology and paid damages for their blacklisting activities.
This Inquiry will find that is was not just the major employers who kept union activists under surveillance and contributed to our blacklisting - it was the political police at the heart of this public inquiry too. The police's own internal investigation, Operation Herne has concluded:
* Para. 4.2 - Police, including Special Branches and the Security Services supplied information to the blacklist funded by the country's major construction firms, The Consulting Association and other agencies. Operation Herne finds this allegation is Proven