Blacklisting discoveries 'appalling'

We are appalled by what we have discovered during our committee hearings. The Consulting Association was an organised conspiracy by big construction firms, to discriminate against workers who raised legitimate grievances over health and safety and other industrial issues.

This was an exercise run for the financial gain of the companies involved and those who benefited must be held accountable.

We were neither convinced nor impressed by the attitude of the people involved in funding, operating and using this blacklist. The suggestion that this was somehow not a blacklist at all because people were not automatically refused employment if their name was on the list is ludicrous.

Thousands of workers and their family members, had intrusive, private information filed away about them so that they could be systematically discriminated against. Workers were denied employment without explanation, financial hardship was caused, lives were disrupted or ruined. There was no right of appeal or challenge to the information held or the decisions made. If a very small number who were treated in this way were not always denied employment, that hardly changes the nature or purpose of the operation.

Further, the suggestions that people were ‘only obeying orders’, or that there were just a few in an organisation who were responsible and no one else knew are just alibis and evasion. Even if this egregious practice was not illegal when it began, it was certainly immoral, and it carried on after it had become illegal. We are sure it would still be going on if the ICO had not uncovered the practice and raided the offices of the consulting association.

Thousands of workers had intrusive, private information filed away about them so that they could be discriminated against

The companies involved set up the blacklist for their own financial benefit, to avoid the risk of legitimate industrial relations or health and safety disputes on site resulting in delays to contracts, penalty clauses being invoked and financial loss. While some of the companies have expressed regret and taken steps to establish how this could have been allowed to go on, we are unclear whether they genuinely regret the practice, or more the fact that they got caught.

Some of the actual entries on the blacklist beggar belief: snippets of malicious gossip about workers and their family members masquerading as ‘information’, or simple statements of legitimate union membership expressed as if it was a personal failing.

This is an interim report; our inquiry so far has posed a series of key questions rather than answering them, particularly in regard to whether compensation should be offered to the people who suffered invasion of their privacy and loss of earnings as a result of this blacklist. We are now inviting further submissions on the four key question areas raised in this report, and we will be taking evidence from more of the firms involved.