3

Blood on their hands

‘I find it difficult to believe that I am standing here today talking to you with the utmost sadness about my father, Patrick O’Sullivan. He was a man of great talent, wit and dedicated to his family. On 5 January, our lives changed beyond recognition when my father was killed here, at Wembley… The last words my father heard were: ‘Run, Patsy, run.’ What kind of terror and fear must he have felt? No-one should have to die like that – to be treated like fodder, just another payroll number to be struck from the list. Surely a man’s life is worth more than that? It has to be.

I had no real comprehension of the dangers he faced at work. He was a carpenter all his life, so too was his father and his father before that. It was a trade that was passed from father to son and he was proud of this tradition. You can see the buildings he helped build, homes where families are now living, landmarks like Canary Wharf, Wimbledon… so many… and now Wembley. Yet all these landmarks were built on the sweat and blood of carpenters, scaffolders, labourers, and the hundreds and hundreds of men who work and suffer within this industry. ‘How many men have to die? How many fathers, sons, brothers must be maimed or killed before governments say enough is enough? The level of complacency that exists within construction would never be tolerated in any other industry. And in this, the 21st century, men are injured and killed every day on building sites around the country – most going unreported by the press. It takes a high-profile site like Wembley to highlight the appalling safety record that these men are forced to endure. ‘It’s too late for my dad. His blood was spilt at Wembley and his blood is on the hands of those responsible for his death.’1

Margaret O’Sullivan

Although it accounts for only around five per cent of the UK workforce, construction accounts for 27 per cent of fatal injuries and 10 per cent of major injuries. Even with the decline in the industry’s workload following the 2008 financial crisis, an average of 53 workers have died every year since. Construction also has the largest burden of occupational cancer across industry, with over 40 per cent of all occupational cancer deaths and cancer registrations. Occupational diseases such as vibration white finger, carpal tunnel syndrome, occupational deafness and dermatitis are all significant issues and incidents of work-related muscular skeletal disorders are 60-per-cent higher than in other industries.2 Even the Health and Safety Executive acknowledges that workforce casualization is a factor, highlighting self-employment in its official statistics. In construction’s flexible labour market, profits appear to be put before people every day of the week.

Safety has been a perennial issue for unions on building sites, where often the most basic welfare facilities are absent. Pete Farrell, chair of the Construction Safety Campaign and UCATT member, remembers when he first started work in the 1970s.

‘Even as a teenager I remember thinking, sod this. Talk about degrading: there was one toilet with no seat, and it didn’t flush either. The bucket, which was all we had to wash in, was used to swill down the toilet. Where you ate your sandwiches was disgusting and seats were upturned buckets and pots of paint.’

Over 30 years later, in 2008, in the Channel Tunnel rail link between Stratford and St Pancras station, the situation had not got any better, according to testing and commissioning electrician Robert Smith.

‘You could walk for miles down there and you would not find a portable toilet or anything. People used to take their food down there because you’d be working in the tunnel all day. They were taking babywipes because there was no water to wash their hands and also taking black bin bags down there with them, so if they wanted to go to the loo, you’d do it in the bin bag, tie it up, then chuck it down the tunnel and wipe your arse on whatever you happened to find. Originally they used to have portable toilets, but they got taken away and so for the last year there were absolutely no facilities at all, which wasn’t very good obviously, especially with the rat problem. There were some massive rats down there. The facilities in the tunnel were appalling really, atrocious, ’cause they did have them originally but took them out. Well obviously you know why – it saves a couple of quid.’

Old Bailey toilets action

Contractors saving money on welfare facilities is an all-too-familiar tale in the building industry. The Barbican luxury apartment and arts complex was one of the largest construction projects ever in the City of London when it started in 1962. Vic Heath, a scaffolder from Camden, was elected as a convenor for the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers on the site. He remembers how the activists first built the union by organizing a meeting about the lack of toilets and welfare facilities. When the contractor refused to supply them, the men all walked a quarter mile to the nearest public facilities at the Old Bailey. After three days of lines of workers tramping along the main road to the court and back, the firm capitulated. The newly established union representatives linked up with another section of the Barbican project operated by Myton (a subsidiary of blacklisting firm Taylor Woodrow), forming a stewards committee with Lou Lewis, Mickey Houlihan and Ralph Langdon. The Barbican was to become one of the best union-organized sites in the industry. A fitting legacy was a historic dispute where the workers refused to install asbestos despite threats of dismissal by the employers. Decades later, the Barbican is one of the few buildings from that era not riddled with the deadly substance. One of the site’s elected UCATT convenors, Jim Franklin from East Ham, went on to be one of the leading lights in the Construction Safety Campaign. The Barbican stewards were to link up with other unionized sites such as Horseferry Road to form the rank-and-file Joint Sites Committee (JSC) movement, which brought together union activists from different unions and different trades. The government of the day was so worried about the activities of these union activists that a government inquiry was held to investigate it.3 The JSC stewards were founding members of the Building Workers Charter and were to play a leading role in the 1972 national building strike.

Even on jobs where canteen and welfare facilities were of a better standard, building workers still saw their treatment as less than satisfactory. Francie Graham and Steuart Merchant are two blacklisted electricians who worked together at Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment.

Now retired, Merchant remembers:

‘The whole time we worked on Aldermaston I kept asking for these wee badges. You know, like them nurses’ badges for radiation? Six times, during the wee spell I was there, they came over the tannoy: “Something has happened – if you’re in the building, stay in the building. If you’re outside the building, get in the nearest Portacabin and shut the windows.”

We used to look out the windows and these boys in the white suits with their Geiger counters would appear but then four hours later it would come over the tannoy: “It was an electrical fault, everything is fine.”

But the site next door, the MF Kent site, they never got this tannoy system, and between them and us was a wire fence. Now, I didn’t know a fence stopped radiation going through.’

Veteran campaigner Francie Graham from Dundee worked alongside Merchant at Aldermaston and remembers:

‘24 hours a day, 365 days a year, there is a “beep-beep-beep”. You can hear it all over the site. They say to you, if that beep stops, get yourself cabined up or stay where you are if you are indoors. It’s a radiation leak. OK. You’re in a smoking cabin – where people were complaining about the draughts in the cabin and you’ve got to shut your doors and then the radiation won’t get through them. It’s just a fallacy. It’s idiotic.’

Graham’s blacklist file has one particular entry that refers to that site:

Date not known: Aldermaston baddies!!

Last emerged September 1989. Possible EPIU.

1996 October: Date information received from source: 3223 (J.D.)

NOTE: 3228 (G.B.) may hold further details.

Do not divulge any of above – refer first.

3223 = Balfour Beatty (JD) = John Dangerfield

3228 = Costain UK Ltd (GB) = Gayle Burton

Building-site deaths on the rise

Their glossy PR brochures might highlight their concern for health and safety, but they omit the fact that, over the decades, many building companies have faced huge fines for criminal breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act.4 For safety to improve on building sites it cannot simply be left to the employers: the workforce needs to be actively engaged in the process.

Deaths and injuries in the construction industry have remained a stubborn blight. Indeed, in 2014, bucking an overall downward trend in workplace fatalities, deaths on building sites increased by eight per cent. Steve Murphy, General Secretary of UCATT, said:

‘The rise in fatalities should send a chill through the industry and it corresponds with a very modest upturn in construction. All the previous evidence shows that, as the industry gets busier, deaths and accidents increase. These dangers are being exacerbated by the massive cuts that the government have made to the HSE[Health and Safety Executive]’s budget and their continued attack on safety laws and regulations.’5

The constant refrain from corporate lobbyists has been that safety regulations strangle growth. This is a message that has found a receptive audience in the Coalition government.

In a speech in 2012 at the rightwing Policy Exchange thinktank, the then Minister for Employment, Chris Grayling, declared that the Coalition government’s aim was to ‘remove as many of the barriers to employment and entrepreneurship as we can’. And the kind of barriers he had in mind were the employee protections which were already withering through poor enforcement.

Grayling said: ‘Within two years, we aim to have rewritten all of our hundreds of health-and-safety regulations and guidelines to make them simpler, easier to understand and more relevant to business. And to have cut the number of regulations in half. We are also taking steps to exempt a million self-employed people from health-and-safety regulations altogether.’6

Hazards, the respected workplace safety research organization, pointed out that Grayling appeared unresponsive to requests for action from families of people killed at work – and traced that back to his career before he became an MP.

‘If Grayling’s not interested in the views of the relatives, he’s keenly interested in public relations,’ Hazards reported. ‘The former PR man with top industry lobbyists and union-busting specialists Burson-Marsteller – he was director in “Employee communications practice” then European Marketing Director in the 1990s when it spearheaded a continent-wide campaign against action on passive smoking.’7

Blacklisted joiner and UCATT member Bill Parry said:

‘In the last 10 years there have been more deaths in construction than in the armed forces since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. With such an awful death toll, it is a duty to raise health-and-safety issues and no-one should be afraid to speak out.’8

While fictitious media stories about health-and-safety laws are used to deform any rational debate on employee protection, there is actually a wealth of evidence that inspections and worker involvement make for safer, and indeed more profitable, firms.9

Regrettably, the blacklisting files suggest that speaking out about health and safety on a building site was more likely to get a worker victimized than to win them praise. Many blacklisted workers suspected they were being targeted because they raised concerns about safety issues, but their suspicions were always ignored by those in authority. Alan Rayner, an electrician from Hutton in Essex, said:

‘I knew I was, but I couldn’t prove it. I was on a job and I complained about safety. Sometimes it was even silly things. On another job I complained about asbestos, which is deadly.’10

Rayner suffered from being blacklisted for 45 years. According to another electrician, and one-time union safety rep, Jerry Murphy from Romford: ‘My file said “don’t employ under any circumstances”. These companies are not worried if somebody dies, so health and safety goes out of the window.’11

Legislation allows union safety reps to carry out inspections on behalf of the workforce and HSE statistics consistently show that workplaces with union safety reps have fewer accidents and fewer days lost than those without. Safety reps allow a voice from the workforce to be heard within a company’s safety processes. In a much-quoted speech from July 2000, Bill Callaghan, former chair of the Health and Safety Commission, called safety reps a ‘reality check’ for employers.12

Unfortunately, employers in the building industry did not always value this reality check. In the case of engineer Dave Smith, his 36-page blacklist file records how he repeatedly lost his job whenever he was elected as a UCATT safety rep. In July 1998 he was dismissed by Costain during the refurbishment of a Tesco store in Goodmayes, Essex. Costain supplied TCA with a copy of an official UCATT leaflet distributed by Smith about asbestos. Smith won the initial stage of his tribunal for victimization for health and safety reasons, which was seen as a landmark victory in the press at the time. The company offered a sizeable financial incentive for Smith to withdraw his claim. Smith’s blacklist file records:

1999 May:

Hearing date set. Above has said ‘No’ to settling out of court – intent on winning this as a test case. Danger is how H&S aspect was handled. If lost, unwanted precedent may be set.

The company successfully appealed the judgment. The 1999 Employment Appeal Tribunal judgment found that because Smith was an agency worker and not a direct employee of Costain, he was not protected by the legislation.

A year later, Smith was working via an agency for a groundworks sub-contractor called Cinnamond on new British Telecom offices being project-managed by Schal, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tarmac. (Within a few months, Tarmac would change its name to Carillion). He was again elected as safety rep and his credentials were sent by the union to inform the contractor of his election. This time the safety rep’s credentials were photocopied with the Schal company stamp and added to his blacklist file, accompanied by the following entry:

1999 May 4th:

Dave Smith has been appointed as UCATT Safety Representative (see copy of union credentials. Re. Dave Smith). Letter from UCATT signed by Lou Lewis, Reg Secr.) asking Schal as main contractor to ‘facilitate D. Smith representing all our members on site’

(Source: 3271/KC) (see copy)

3271 = Tarmac/Carillion

But rather than the main contractor embracing someone prepared to act as a voice of the workforce on safety issues, they devised a method to remove Smith from the site and recorded their thoughts on his blacklist file.

Advice given by official of construction body is to establish if D Smith is employed by an agency, and not directly employed, write to UCATT stating that he is not thought a suitable person for this appointment, and/or if the company does not recognize UCATT, his appointment as safety Rep is inappropriate.

1999 May 6th:

Cinnamond Construction to refuse above’s credentials (as safety rep) as he is not an employee of theirs. Cinnamond to tell Heffo agency supplying above to site, that D Smith is no longer required on site i.e. do not propose to pay him an engineer’s rates to go around site as safety rep.

Concern has been expressed that the route onto sites via agencies is not frequently monitored, and this needs addressing as similar tactics by D Smith are almost certain to arise in the near future.

The experienced engineer was dismissed from site soon afterwards and, in the middle of a building boom, his income in the next 12 months fell to just £12,000. Ron McKay, the UCATT regional official at the time, recalls:

‘I held meetings with management on site concerning Smith’s dismissal. They refused point blank to reinstate Mr Smith. Instead they tried to buy him off but he refused the offer. Worryingly, it is my experience that when someone took on this safety representative’s role, their days were numbered and they would usually be dismissed from site at the earliest opportunity’13

The companies which used the blacklist have, however, steadfastly maintained that it was not a tool for targeting those who raised safety concerns.

Cullum McAlpine, director of Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, told the Scottish Affairs Select Committee: ‘Reporting health and safety would never be disruptive. It is entirely right and proper that health and safety opinions – constructive ones – should be heard in the right way.’14

Mike Peasland, CEO, Balfour Beatty Construction Services UK, reassured MPs on the same committee: ‘We would never discriminate against people for genuine health and safety grievances.’15

Harvey Francis, executive vice president, Skanska UK, which was one of the biggest users of the Association, declared a few months after the scandal broke: ‘[We] subscribed to the list to ensure the safety of people working on our sites. Health and safety in construction is of paramount importance. While I’m not excusing [using the blacklist], this was also a way of trying to keep the sites safe.’16

Meanwhile Ron McKay has subsequently been sent a copy of his own TCA blacklist file.

Targeting safety reps

Simon Hester, Prospect union rep for HSE inspectors and himself an HSE construction inspector who investigates deaths on building sites, has witnessed the effects of targeting safety reps.

‘Good health and safety on construction sites is dependent on high levels of communication and openness – and trade union organization is officially recognized as beneficial. Blacklisting of trade union reps is a disaster because it creates a climate of fear.’17

Even on building sites where safety reps had patently improved safety conditions, their names were still forwarded to The Consulting Association, as Mickey Guyll, a blacklisted crane driver from Billericay in Essex, explained:

‘I worked for Edmund Nuttall on the Docklands Light Railway where it went underground from Tower Hill to Bank station in 1989 and there was a death on that site and loads of major accidents. We got organized as workers and I was elected safety rep. After I was elected safety rep, we had no more deaths on site and no more major accidents. My thanks for that was to be placed on a blacklist by Edmund Nuttall at 24 years of age. I’ve never drove a tower crane again, although I’d love to. Life was very hard. I went from being a tower crane driver to making concrete posts at about 20 per cent of the wages. I’m a clapped-out cabbie now.’

Mickey Guyll’s first entry on his blacklist file reads:

1992 source 3246: Worked at their docklands job. Was shop steward involved in safety issues.

3246 = Edmund Nuttall (now BAM Nuttall)

Guyll was far from being the only union safety rep to be targeted for raising concerns about safety on site, as entries from dozens of blacklist files demonstrate, among them the following:

UCATT activist concentrating on health-and-safety issues

After taking on showed signs of militancy over safety

Involved in safety strike

Elected safety rep on site

While at Stansted, drew H&S issues to the attention of site manager

He was a T&GW safety rep first class troublemaker.

Spoke at TUC conference on Health & Safety

The hostility to any interference with employers’ absolute authority was such that many safety reps were targeted as soon as they were elected. As the building boom started to take off in the mid-1990s, Bovis was the main contractor on a £30-million casino and luxury flat complex on the Isle of Dogs, close to Canary Wharf. The project had six tower cranes and 600 workers and UCATT had received a number of complaints about safety. UCATT official Jerry Swain held a union meeting in the site canteen and George Fuller, a bricklayer working for sub-contractor Irvine Whitlock, was elected:

‘When Jerry gave his speech about building workers being safe at work, he asked for a safety rep and I volunteered. On a show of hands I was elected but immediately people were saying things like “you’ll be gone by the end of the week, mate” or “bye bye”.’

Fuller recalls Irvine Whitlock management interrupting the meeting to tell the bricklayers that all overtime would be stopped if the union came on the job. Fuller was separated from the rest of the bricklaying gangs and made to work on his own. When the UCATT safety rep went to the site office he was repeatedly sworn at and threatened. Fuller claims to have received a death threat from one of the Irvine Whitlock managerial staff and so started carrying a small recording device.

‘A whole squad of them came up to me. This labourer gave me the whisper: “watch out George, they’re on their way”.

One came up to me and called me a “cunt” – and he had a director standing with him, and I was like that bloke in The Bridge on the River Kwai saying “Under the Geneva Convention”, I was saying “Under the Working Rule Agreement”.’

The company was making the bricklayers build the internal blockwork at the same time as the external brickwork, with a danger of bits of block or tools dropping on the people working below, especially in high winds. Despite Fuller’s safety reports, this is exactly what happened.

‘About 60 blocks – big blocks – got blown from the sixth floor down to the second floor where some bricklayers were working fixing these metal ledges. Luckily, most of them had gone inside of the building. I didn’t have a camera – but I made some witness statements, writing down a description of it and I went to report it. It’s what I’d been saying was likely to happen. I went into the office with this safety rep’s report form. All he was interested in was how much time I’d spent away from my place of work. Wall-to-wall ’effing and blinding.’

Because of the earlier threats, the UCATT safety rep secretly recorded the exchange and the voice recording was broadcast on a BBC TV documentary. The incident gained considerable media attention and two east London Labour MPs, Tony Banks and Jim Fitzpatrick, both intervened on the bricklayer’s behalf.

Directors of Irvine Whitlock were contacted by the authors but declined to comment. However, director Geoff Irvine told Building magazine: ‘I gave Mr Fuller a verbal apology [for the way the foreman had spoken to him].’ Irvine denied that Fuller had ever been victimized.18 But UCATT official Chris Tiff, quoted in the same article, responded: ‘The matter is far from resolved, until we get a written apology from Irvine Whitlock.’19

Sometimes the employer’s response to workers who complained about safety on site went further than just threats.

George Fuller and another UCATT member, John Kean, were employed on a housing site in Hammersmith, London. Both had refused to be registered as self-employed and had asked to be put on ‘the cards’ – paid through PAYE. Fuller then records what happened when he was elected as a steward and safety rep. ‘Following my election/appointment we were violently attacked by strangers recently brought on to the site. The police were called but the four assailants got clean away.’

Fuller says the main contractor dismissed the incident as: ‘Six of one and half-a-dozen of another’.20

Keane and Fuller both found themselves blacklisted. The attack was just one incident in a wave of violence against union activists on building sites in the mid-1980s. Most went unnoticed but the George Fuller confrontation appeared in the press, as did a much more serious incident.21

In 1984 two brothers, John and Garry Churton, along with another bricklayer, John Jones, were building retirement homes in South London. There were a number of sub-contractors on the site. Jones remembers what the site was like when they first started:

‘The health and safety and welfare conditions were atrocious. The changing room, you wouldn’t let your dog in it, so bad, dingy, dirty, filthy to eat your sandwiches. So we set about asking them for better conditions.’22

Jones was elected as UCATT shop steward and, with support from the Churton brothers, negotiated brand new toilets, a large canteen and new changing huts. But the employers on the site made it obvious that the union was not welcome. The union men were given the worst jobs, John Jones’ car was repeatedly damaged, Garry Churton’s shoes were nailed to the floor and attempts were made to sack the union men. But when that failed things suddenly got worse.

Garry Churton remembers what happened,

‘The employer didn’t want any union organization. I don’t know why. I don’t know what they thought we were doing wrong. We went there, did us job, like all the others, but they just wanted to get shot of us. I think they were having enough of it and the employer thought they’d get someone to sort us out. And they did.

It was just a normal day. Me and me brother normally worked together but they split us and put us on different parts of the site. And the bloke who did it. He’d only started the day before. He’d come from nowhere. Sort of cocky lad – but he came up to talk to us and find out things, which was a bit unusual. He was working for the subbie. He said he was a hod carrier but he didn’t seem to do anything. He didn’t seem to know the trade, what to do. He was struggling with the hod. He must have been 30 years old. The foremen said they knew him but when he did what he did, they said they didn’t know him.

They split us up on that afternoon. The real annoying part about it was I wore my safety hat all the time but because they put me in a certain place where there was nothing above me in a small alcove, I took it off.

He came up to me with two blokes from the office. And there was three of them all around me. And he’s got this hod and I was thinking – what’s he doing with them and why’s he holding the hod like that? I thought, he’s not gonna hit me with the hod is he? And then he clouts me with it. He hits me with the hod and the only thing I could do, I didn’t go down, I just grabbed hold of the hod and wrestled it off him. I had it in my hand and he just ran off. It annoyed me, why didn’t I hit him back with it? I threw the hod down. This was a metal hod, aluminium.

As I went to go up to the canteen, I saw my brother, he was walking up staggering. Blood gushing from his head. What’s happened to him? The same thing that had happened to me. He did my brother first and then he came round and done me.’23

Garry Churton had 10 stitches in his head; his older brother John wasn’t so lucky.

‘My brother ended up with a fractured skull and he has never worked since. He moved back to Stoke-on-Trent and he’s been on medication ever since. He’s diagnosed as a multiple schizophrenic. Paranoid and depressed. He’s on medication, some sort of liquid cosh to keep him sedated. Not completely sedated but to keep him calm and stop him getting aggressive. He was quite an activist my brother was. To be quite honest, I looked up to my brother when he did what he did. Going on marches and organizing things – quite good. Now it seems he’s just lost the plot because of his age and the drugs all that time.’

The police investigated but no-one on site had any details for the assailant.24 It became something of a cause célèbre that was reported widely in the radical and trade press.25 UCATT provided legal representation and the two brothers received compensation from the criminal injuries scheme. John Churton received £66,000 and Garry was awarded £600. But, as Construction News reported: ‘The anonymous male attacker, described as having a “military appearance”, was never found.’26

However Garry says he later bumped into the man responsible for ordering the assault in a pub in London.

‘To be honest he was quite pleasant. He said: “I paid that bloke £500 to do it.” I said: “That’s not proof is it? I can say you said it and you could say you didn’t. I’m not gonna get into anything. It’ll be no good to me.”

I’ve sort of brushed it under the carpet. I don’t talk about it – or not as much as I could do. It’s not that I want to forget it: I’ve just forgot it. At that time, I didn’t feel like a martyr. I felt like I was doing what activists do. Standing up for their rights. You’ve got to stand up or else nothing will get done. I feel, alright then, it was a hod, it could have killed me to be quite honest, but ’cause I survived I feel that I done good for some reason. It just proves a point that this is the kind of stuff that goes on and we are always accused of being the aggressors.’

Jones and the Churton brothers were all added to the blacklist after that dispute. John Jones and Garry Churton both found it difficult to find work in contracting but eventually found work in local authorities. John Churton never worked again in the next 30 years.

Construction Safety Campaign

During the late 1980s, the Thatcher government was fighting the unions while a boom in the building industry saw deaths in the construction sector rise to an average of three a week. It was against this industrial background that rank-and-file workers decided to set up the Construction Safety Campaign (CSC). Two UCATT bricklayers, Tony Holding from Liverpool and John Kean from Islington, complained about the safety conditions on a building site in west London. Holding, now an experienced trade union tutor, remembers:

‘They were still demolishing on the scaffold above our heads when we were laying bricks in the footings. We didn’t think it was very safe but they didn’t take it very seriously. So we walked off the job. The next day the scaffold collapsed and we saw it on the news. Two young lads from Ireland were killed. That was the beginnings of the Construction Safety Campaign. We had complained about the safety – that was the first time a rank-and-file building workers’ group had picketed a coroner’s court.’

George Fuller remembers that the incident galvanized worker action.

‘We distributed leaflets around all the local building sites. It got on TV and the Irish Post came along. And then we carried on doing that for two more coroner’s courts and then the CSC grew out of that. The jury delivered an open verdict and it gained a lot of publicity in the press. The CSC had all the ingredients – us, the lawyers, the media, the relatives – it was broad based.

There was another one where an Irish labourer called Patrick Walsh was killed in a trench collapse, so our union branch hired the Red Rose Club in Seven Sisters Road to put on a benefit do. Instead of three or four people turning up like usual, we got a really big crowd and it set a precedent. It showed other people that there was a model of activity for building workers to campaign.’

The activity coalesced and two meetings were held in parliament attended by Labour MPs Mildred Gordon and Eric Heffer. Activists from UCATT, TGWU and different leftwing groups came together to build a rank-and-file campaign to take up the issue of deaths on building sites. Tony O’Brien was elected as Secretary, Andy Higgins as Treasurer and ex-Barbican steward Jim Franklin as the first Chair of the Construction Safety Campaign.

Mick Holder, currently national health and safety officer for the train drivers’ union ASLEF, was formerly a carpenter and, for a short time, the full-time worker for the CSC. He said:

‘We took an aggressive stance against the deaths, protesting at sites where workers were killed, outside inquests, outside the law courts if there was a prosecution following a death. It was a very busy few years, especially in the City of London, which became the construction killing fields and the unions were barred from many of the major sites.’27

According to Tony O’Brien, blacklisted painter and CSC secretary from its formation until 2013:

‘From its inception, the CSC has said that workers’ safety is both a political and industrial struggle, and that this struggle could only be won by the workers themselves getting organized and advancing their ability to take control of their own safety. While construction workers have carried out thousands of mainly individual acts of resistance to poor health and safety on sites, the CSC gave a political campaigning expression to this resistance.’28

For more than quarter of a century, the CSC has been the premier grassroots safety campaign in the building industry. The profile of deaths on building sites has been raised and made into a political issue. The CSC was at the forefront of the campaign to ban asbestos in the UK and the establishment of International Workers Memorial Day on 28 April. CSC activists have gone on to play leading roles in the Hazards movement and in asbestos victims’ support groups. But campaigning for better health and safety, protesting outside coroner’s courts and assisting bereaved relatives was enough to get someone blacklisted. The well-respected union-funded safety magazine Hazards, edited by one-time CSC activist Rory O’Neill, was one of the publications purchased by The Consulting Association. Articles about building workers were cut and pasted into files.

Leading figures in the CSC such as Andy Higgins, Tommy Finn and Tony O’Brien were all blacklisted for their roles in the Campaign. O’Brien’s blacklist file is filled with cuttings and reports from his years of campaigning. The Consulting Association held a separate file on the Construction Safety Campaign, which unfortunately the ICO failed to seize, but press cuttings and entries relating to the CSC appear on blacklist files decades apart.

The Pfizers dispute

One of the safety disputes to become part of industry folklore took place in 2000 at the new Pfizers pharmaceutical factory being built to manufacture Viagra at Sandwich in Kent. The sudden upturn in demand for the drug meant that there was a desperate need for skilled workers by the main contractor AMEC and electrical contractor Balfour Kilpatrick. One of those that went there was Steve Acheson, who had recently finished two years as a supervisor on the Channel Tunnel for Balfour Kilpatrick. Met Office weather reports later used as tribunal evidence show that the area had experienced the worst rainfall since records began; the effect was to leave the site awash with slurry. Acheson describes the conditions:

‘For a multimillion-pound project, what a disappointment. It was reminiscent of the Somme – the old battle scenes you watch on TV. Walking through six inches of soaking wet mud to your workface. Such was the size of the site, it was 20 minutes for me to get to my workplace. We were walking through a sea of mud, no separate pedestrianized walkways, no nothing. We were followed at all times by these big American-type load haulers where the wheels were twice the size of a human, about 15-foot massive tyres on them. We noticed articulated lorries were pulling up and when they were reversing, no banksmen were being used or anything. I knew that this was an accident waiting to happen.’29

The presence of vermin on site meant that there was a clear risk of workers contracting the potentially fatal Weils disease from rat urine contaminating wet overalls. Between AMEC and the other contractors, there was a large team of company safety officers on site. The workforce had repeatedly raised the issues highlighted by Acheson but nothing had been done. Workers on site had contacted the HSE and eventually tarmac roads were laid but still no drying rooms or Wellington boots were provided.

The rain kept falling and a deluge left the site completely flooded, with orange road cones floating away in the fast-flowing water. The workers faced the prospect of having to walk through the flood but with no facilities to dry their clothes at the end of the shift. Exasperated, the workers wanted to walk off the job but union activists argued instead that they should exercise their legal rights and remain on site but stay in the canteen until the employer provided mandatory Wellington boots and the workplace was made safe. The company response was to dismiss around 200 workers without notice.

Using a Working Men’s Club in Dover as a base, the locked-out workers picketed the plant for seven weeks. Eventually workers were forced to reapply for their previous jobs. Many of those not reinstated won successful employment tribunal claims. During the tribunal hearing, a Health and Safety Executive inspector apologized to the sacked electricians because, despite his best efforts, it had taken their actions to improve conditions on the site.

Rab Campbell, the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union steward, had worked for one of the contractors, Balfour Kilpatrick, for nearly 35 years. He could have gone back to work at any time but stood out on principle with the rest of the sacked workers. He was blacklisted after the dispute but died before receiving any legal redress. Another long-term Balfour Kilpatrick employee sacked and then blacklisted was Frank Matthews. He was to tell the BBC TV Panorama programme,

‘The site was flooded and we didn’t want to work out there in the rain and the soaking wet because we had nowhere to dry our clothes. So they decided to sack everybody. They’d just employed me for 15 years and gave me full rein of looking after jobs and managing sites responsible for millions of pounds. It just doesn’t add up, does it? I was never a troublemaker.’

Matthews, along with 50 other workers from the Pfizers building site, was added to the Consulting Association blacklist. Jill Fisher is another of those named and is one of a handful of women with a blacklist file, which has the following entry:

2000 June 21 the following were not re-employed by 3223/F following the unofficial action at Pfizer, Sandwich between April and May 2000: these were regarded as followers rather than leaders of the unofficial action

One of the main troublemakers during the dispute

3223/F = Balfour Kilpatrick

The blacklisted workers were exercising their legal right not to be forced to work in unsafe conditions – as was proven when many of them were successful in subsequent employment tribunal claims. Yet Balfour Kilpatrick is happy to secretly smear them as being ‘troublemakers’ involved in ‘unofficial action’.

For Fisher, now teaching electrical engineering in Glasgow, those secret smears got very personal and have followed her around ever since.

‘It says on my file that I’m a “nasty piece of work”, with exclamation marks, which I was a bit surprised about. I was only 20 at the time. It says I was phoning people up and threatening them, which is a lot of nonsense. It’s actually slander, complete lies.

I had virtually nothing to do with the union but was dismissed for no fault of my own. These people tried to sabotage my working life and deserve to be punished for their actions. It was the start of the building boom but I found it impossible to get a decent job. I couldn’t progress my career in any way because I couldn’t get a job with any of the big companies. So I ended up leaving the trade, paying myself through college and university and starting as an electrical engineer. That’s what I had to do, basically. Four years, HNC, HND, then I was up at Cali Uni getting my BEng. I just managed to get work in November.’30

Jill Fisher was talking in 2013, a decade after the Pfizers dispute.

The information on the blacklist files is very often incorrect. Sometimes, after a worker had raised genuine concerns about safety issues, they were dismissed and then false information subsequently placed on their blacklist file. Blacklisted electrician Steve Kelly from Essex is well known in the industry – always smartly dressed in a mod style and riding a vintage Lambretta. He worked on the redevelopment of the Colchester Barracks in 2007. He lasted one day. The following entry appears in his blacklist file:

13th December 2007. applied to 3239 via agency Hays Montrose for Colchester garrison project along with

Main contact DC given details both were removed from site on the day of application for poor quality of work

3239 = Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd
DC = David Cochrane, head of HR at McAlpine’s and the last Chairman of The Consulting Association

Kelly has a slightly different recollection of events.

‘Total bollocks! We refused to work on a moveable mobile scaffold tower as we had been instructed to following the health-and-safety induction by McAlpine, where McAlpine’s safety officer said: ‘No-one works on my site without the training – if you haven’t got the right ticket don’t go on them towers. It’s down to your employer to give you the training.’31

It would appear that the company’s desire to keep Kelly off the project took priority over its own safety officer’s stated desire for a safe site.

Safety on offshore oil rigs

On 6 July 1988, 167 oil workers were killed when the Piper Alpha oil rig was engulfed in flames due to a massive gas leak after a safety valve had been deliberately removed. In the wake of the disaster, the North Sea saw a wave of industrial action over the issue of safety, including occupations of oil and gas rigs. The activists who led the occupations in the North Sea coalesced around a rank-and-file organization called the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC).

One of those OILC members was Lee Fowler, a young electrician from The Wirral who was working on the construction of Piper Bravo, the platform built to replace Piper Alpha. There were 1,500 workers living and working 120 miles north of Aberdeen on an accommodation barge next to the new rig, itself only 500 yards away from the burnt wreckage it was to replace. In March 1992, snow caused a white-out and helicopter operations were cancelled. Further north, near the Shetlands at Shell’s Cormorant Alpha rig, a Bristow Helicopters Super Puma crashed, killing 11 men.

The tragedy had a big effect on the 22-year-old electrician, who put himself forward and was elected safety representative for the 200 electricians on Piper Bravo. For a few months, safety appeared to be given a high priority by the Offshore Installation Manager, who held weekly meetings with the safety reps. But towards the end of the project the pressure was on to get the job completed and supervisors started to ignore the concerns raised by the reps. Fowler remembers that, in exasperation, all eight safety reps simultaneously put in a letter of resignation. The company building the rig flew in a senior executive from America and Fowler remembers a tense meeting but the situation improved slightly.

Once the contract had finished, however, still in his early twenties, Fowler was put on the blacklist and never secured a job working offshore again. Some time later, he managed to find employment on a gas terminal in North Wales, where he bumped into a supervisor who was on Piper Bravo, who asked: ‘How the fucking hell did you get on this job? You’re blacked.’

One of the leading academics studying safety on offshore oil rigs, Professor Charles Woolfson, has researched this area carefully and has numerous studies to show that this practice was highly typical of the industry. Professor Woolfson had his own run-in with the blacklist, as we will see shortly.

Concerns have been raised repeatedly about the treatment of health and safety reps in the offshore oil industry. In 2010, the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee produced a report looking at the UK implications of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The report says that the industry body Oil and Gas UK ‘tried to assure us [the Committee] that the offshore workforce are “free and able to intervene on issues of safety, and without fear of retribution”’. However, the Committee also noted an HSE report from 2009 that rig staff were subject to ‘bullying, aggression, harassment, humiliation and intimidation’ from offshore management. And the Committee heard from Dr Jonathan Wills, independent councillor for Lerwick South and a freelance environmental consultant, who said: ‘Whistleblowers are not able to call a halt to things and the managers are obviously trying to make money for the company.’

The Committee’s report concluded: ‘We find some conflict in the reports from the HSE about bullying and harassment on rigs and the assurances of the industry that sincere whistleblowers will be heard and protected. We recommend that the government should discuss with the industry and unions what further steps are needed to prevent safety representatives from being or feeling intimidated into not reporting a hazard, potential or otherwise.’

Many of the OILC union activists and participants in the wave of occupations never worked in the sector again, becoming blacklisted by use of what is known as ‘the NRB system’. At the end of any stint offshore, the rig manager writes comments on the worker’s personnel card. NRB stands for ‘Not Required Back’; it appeared on the offshore industry paperwork for hundreds of OILC activists and has been described as an open blacklist for many years. Fowler explains what a culture of fear NRB created on the rigs:

‘NRB was a big deal. You basically kept your head down and kept your mouth shut because if you didn’t do exactly what they wanted you to do, you weren’t working in the North Sea again. We had the OILC stickers on our hats and they didn’t like it. They frowned upon that. Unions weren’t mentioned. The only ones I really knew were in the union were those with the OILC stickers on their hard hats – they were brave enough to say “Yes, I am in the union”.’

That The Consulting Association took an interest in the offshore industry is undoubted. The large number of blacklisted workers from Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire that appear on the blacklist, including some of the OILC leading lights such as Ronnie McDonald and Jake Molloy, are testimony to that. TCA kept a separate file on OILC, which the ICO again failed to seize.

It was not only union activists who were added to the blacklist due to raising concerns about safety in the offshore industry. The Consulting Association also opened a file on Professor Charles Woolfson, the aforementioned leading academic in oil industry safety and industrial relations. His blacklist file includes the entries:

Woolfson, Charles (Professor) – senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, University of Glasgow.

A failure to investigate

Safety remains a central issue for construction workers. Despite the assurances of those at the top, when safety impacts on profits, the mask of compassion is often dropped to expose naked gangsterism. The almost pathological dislike of anyone who dares to criticize the way safety is managed, has resulted in the voice of the workforce virtually being extinguished. Construction continues to have a fatality rate far in excess of other industries: victimization of workers prepared to raise concerns about safety is without doubt a contributory factor.

Blacklisting union safety reps costs workers’ lives. The Health and Safety Executive has powers under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to issue notices and even take criminal prosecutions. Yet, despite making the right noises, the HSE has not issued a single improvement notice or prosecution against a company for mistreatment of a safety rep since 2004. More than five years after the discovery of the blacklist and all the subsequent revelations, the HSE still has not carried out an investigation against any firms involved in the systematic blacklisting of union safety reps.