‘A Crusade for Capitalism’: blacklisting in Britain and the war against workers’ rights By Clare Lynch-Watson, History student at Jesus College
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The nation’s suffering amidst the COVID-19 crisis has been exacerbated by the ongoing erosion of workers’ rights. With zero hour workers falling through the government’s social security net and warehouse workers being forced to work without proper safety equipment, the brunt of COVID-19 is not being shared equally. Just as NHS staff are endangered by the effects of austerity, so are those in the ‘gig economy’ without entitlements to sick pay. As the state of 21st century capitalism has become the focus of this renewed debate, the importance of adequate workers’ rights and the detrimental impact of their loss has become clearer than ever. How and why did we get to this point? The discovery that many of Britain’s biggest construction companies were for decades able to blacklist thousands of workers is an illuminating part of this history. When their collusion with the now-defunct Consulting Association was uncovered in 2009, decades of employee blacklisting was exposed. Funded by the industry, this organisation collected and recorded the personal details of thousands of workers – including their date of birth, home address, national insurance number, vehicle registration and trade union membership. Senior staff at over forty of the UK’s leading construction firms systematically vetted job applicants against this data, in what has been called one of the worst cases of organised human rights abuses in recent British history.
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This covert strategy was used to exclude workers that employers didn’t like, such as those who had raised health and safety concerns or were known to be involved in trade unions or left-of-centre political causes. Typical files included details such as “ex-shop steward, definite problems”; “will cause trouble, strong TU [trade union]”; “militant and upfront in strike”; “drew H&S [health and safety] issues to attention of 3245’s site manager.” In 2013 the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee launched an inquiry into employment blacklisting. One witness, Dave Smith, whose file ran from 1992 to 2005 and filled 36 pages, described how his attempts to raise concerns over “asbestos, toilets overflowing on building sites and a young lad falling off the third floor of scaffolding” had been passed on to the Consulting Association and punished with years of unemployment by unscrupulous companies. Involvement in Labour politics and environmental or anti-racist causes was also deemed worthy of note in the blacklist, information that the Metropolitan Police finally admitted to supplying in 2018. In one case, a man was filed simply for writing a letter to The Scotsman to praise the council for buying a painting of Nelson Mandela.
The impact was catastrophic for a large number of construction workers, who had no idea that their information was being recorded. They simply knew that work had dried up. The operation “completely ruined my life” said one affected construction worker, Anthony Sweeney, who was blacklisted firstly by McAlpine and then by a series of other companies, leaving him workless for many years. John Byran, blacklisted by Taylor Woodrow, described a similar experience after being noted as an “instigator” of a strike over onsite health and safety violations. Those affected describe the intense strain that years of seemingly inexplicable unemployment inevitably put on themselves and their families. One witness in the Commons inquiry spoke of suicide cases amongst blacklisted workers. The trade union Unite reports that, despite legal action resulting from this national scandal and the closure of the Consulting Association, blacklisting persists. Not only does it threaten to ruin people’s lives, it fosters a culture of fear and intimidation in which workers are vulnerable to exploitative and dangerous working practices. It is an unscrupulous weapon of class war wielded to maximize profits at the expense of workers’ basic rights. Although established in 1993, the Consulting Association’s history began much earlier: its activities are one chapter in a longer story of anti-labour blacklisting practices in British industry. When the Consulting Association’s forerunner, the Economic League, was founded in 1919, its stated function was to “crusade for capitalism” in a climate of increasing labour agitation. Socialism, syndicalism and revolutionary communist ideas had been gaining new ground
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