by Dave Smith & Phil Chamberlain
On 23 February 1998, an explosion left a crater 22 metres wide and 7 metres deep in the playing fields of George Green School, on the Isle of Dogs in east London. Luckily it happened at five in the morning when the school was empty. If the explosion had occurred during school playtime, it would have been a major disaster. It was caused by compressed air in a tunnel extending the Docklands Light Railway under the Thames to Greenwich. The incident later resulted in the third-biggest fine ever handed down by a British Court for breach of health-and-safety legislation.
When I arrived for the start of my shift that morning, lumps of earth the size of a small car were stuck five storeys up on the outside of a block of flats 100 metres away from the school. I contacted my union and, at a packed meeting in the site canteen a few days later, I was elected as a safety rep for the building union, UCATT. From that day on, major construction companies started taking a keen interest in my activities – unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons. In the next three years I was repeatedly refused work or dismissed from building sites and found myself virtually unemployable, even though this was the middle of a building boom when the industry was crying out for skilled workers. By 2001, I could barely pay my mortgage and was forced to leave the industry I had worked in since I left school. For the next seven years, I hardly gave construction another thought, unless it was to discuss work with family members.
Fast forward to 8am on 6 March 2009 and the lead story on Radio 4’s Today programme was about a shady outfit called The Consulting Association. I listened while driving into north London and made a point of visiting the corner shop to buy the Guardian before going into work. I didn’t realize it at the time but the front-page article I read that morning was written by Phil Chamberlain. Later, I watched as the Association’s role in blacklisting was the lead item on the BBC 9 o’clock news. If I am honest, my overriding thought, and that of other builders I spoke to that day, was: ‘Blacklisting in the building industry? How on earth is this the lead news item? Everyone has known this was going on for decades.’
And that really is the point of this book. It is an attempt to expose the dirty secret behind all those construction hoardings and scaffolding you walk past every day – to name and shame the people who orchestrated the blacklisting of thousands and to expose the system which made it an integral part of doing business on building sites.
We wanted to hear from all those involved. So you will read interviews with people who were at the heart of this scandal: the bookkeepers and spies, the human-resources managers and security officials. We didn’t gather gossip in secret; we wanted to know their motivations and practices. Many of them saw their work as part of a battle – hence the subtitle of this book.
Everyone who was involved with industrial relations in the building industry knew that blacklisting was rampant. It was an open secret. It was the price paid by anyone prepared to stand up for the rights of their fellow workers, to have the temerity to ask for decent facilities or even for wages to be paid on time. Managers used to boast about putting union people on the blacklist and making sure they’d never work again. Union conferences debated blacklisting year after year and some of the older guys told stories about how they had suffered years of unemployment or had been forced to leave the industry altogether to pay the bills. We all knew about blacklisting but only because we were right in the middle of it. But if you weren’t part of it, the building game was another world.
When I was in my twenties, I listened to the old boys talking about the blacklist and violence against activists. I viewed it as a kind of oral history: how bad it was back in the day. There was a building boom going on and although I couldn’t get a job for any of the big companies, I was working in supervisory positions via employment agencies or smaller subcontractors. Some of the outfits I worked for didn’t even have a proper office; the subcontractor operated out of the back of his Merc. How on earth could he possibly know that, two years before, I had been a safety rep while working 100 miles away, for a completely different firm? Initially, I was sceptical.
But slowly it became more and more apparent that I was one of those on the blacklist. I didn’t know the mechanism, but the effect was obvious. I was a trade-union activist in the building industry. And, as an elected union safety rep, I attended TUC training courses and I was able to apply for membership of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. As part of the membership application I had to provide a list of all the places I had worked where I had been a safety rep, my length of service and reason for leaving. Completing the form brought it home to me. I hadn’t been sacked just once but rather every single time that I had raised safety issues on a building site. And the times out of work were getting longer than the times in work.
The mid-1990s saw the start of an unprecedented building boom with wages rising sharply as the shortage of skilled labour kicked in. I was a qualified engineer with over a decade of experience and had even started working in junior management roles. It was at this time that I also became more active in the union and started raising concerns about asbestos and overflowing toilets on building sites. The loadsamoney effect only lasted a few years with me. In 1998 I was driving a big 4x4. By 2000, I couldn’t get a job as an engineer anywhere, and even employment agencies stopped phoning me. When, in desperation, I rang to ask why, one agency honestly told me that I came up as ‘code 99’ on their computer system, which meant that they had been told never to offer me work ever again. My tax returns that year show that I earned around £12,000 and I was now driving a battered old £300 Fiesta van with questionable paperwork – in the middle of a building boom!
When everyone else is taking their kids to Disney World in Florida, unemployment is not nice. For the only time in my life, I went to the doctors asking for sleeping pills. After another year, it was so obvious I was being blacklisted that I left the industry altogether. The trade unions helped me out again and I was lucky enough to get a job working as a TUC tutor, teaching shop stewards on the very courses I had attended a few years earlier. Teaching adults in Further Education doesn’t pay what engineers were earning in a building boom but it covered the mortgage.
If the intention of the blacklist was to drive the activists out of the industry, then it worked. I left, and dozens of other union people I knew did the same or took lower-paid jobs in the public sector. My kids missed some school trips, we defaulted on our mortgage payments a few times and, as a grown man, I had to borrow money from my parents. But others suffered much more than my family. Other blacklisted workers lost their homes completely, split up from their partners or had serious health issues. Some committed suicide.
When I finally received a copy of my blacklist file in 2009, it was 36 pages long. The transnational building firms who set up and ran The Consulting Association had had me under surveillance from 1992 until 2006. My file contains my name, address, national insurance numbers, photographs, phone numbers and car registration. Copies of my safety rep’s credentials appear on three separate pages. Leaflets I had handed out about asbestos were added to my file and speeches I made at UCATT and TUC conferences were recorded verbatim. My file contained information about my brother and my wife, as well as recording nearly every job I worked on for over a decade.
In mid-2009, I got a message about a meeting in the Houses of Parliament being hosted by John McDonnell MP. For the blacklisted workers who sat around the table that night, these firms had taken the food off our kids’ tables: for us, this was personal. We knew that if there was going to be a successful campaign, then we would have to run it ourselves. It was the first time I had met many of the people who were to become good friends and comrades. But we were brought up in the building industry: we were all used to hard work and getting our hands dirty. Rather reluctantly, I agreed to take on the role of secretary temporarily. That was six years ago. It has been my honour to have met and worked alongside some of the most honest and hard-working people in our movement. Some of them suffered from the impact of blacklisting and some of them have fought in our campaign for justice.
And that is the other reason for this book: to tell their story. To give a voice to those blacklisted workers and their families who are often absent in the debates in parliament and the discussions among well-paid lawyers. We have interviewed over 100 blacklisted workers and their families, with more being quoted from TV, youtube footage or from books.
During the writing of this book we have been given well-meaning and some not so well-meaning warnings. We had letters from lawyers representing parties who would rather we did not write about them. One time we were told to ‘be careful’ because we were ‘poking very powerful people with a big stick and they won’t like it’. Another time we were told that we were either ‘very brave or very stupid – there is a lot of money and a lot of very dangerous people involved in all this’. We’re not particularly brave. But, as one of the protagonists in the story is described, we’re like a dog with a bone and we’ve been loath to let go.
During the seven years it has taken to be published, company directors, QCs, trade-union general secretaries, MPs, MEPs, US Senators, party leaders and the prime minister have all had their say. Legal cases are at the High Court and the European Court of Human Rights. The proven involvement of the police and security services has made blacklisting an accepted part of the political debate. This book is not an historical artefact. Most of the people we name as implicated have prospered rather than been punished. Many still hold senior positions and some have even been promoted. The ideology that encouraged the secret smearing and spying is still widely held by the powers-that-be.
One of the most difficult sections to write was the criticism of the trade unions. Both the authors are proud to be trade unionists. It is clear that without diligent research and campaigning by trade unions the full picture of blacklisting would never have emerged. Yet corporations have compromised the ideals of some and we do not shirk from looking at where these compromises have taken place and why. There are lessons here for anyone interested in industrial relations in the 21st century.
And, talking of compromises, writing a book was ours. The number of words is limited and the biggest battle was over what to leave out. In resisting the best intentions of lawyers to stifle debate, we gathered considerable amounts of documentary evidence, most of which we have not been able to find space for.
Virtually all of this information was already in the public domain, having been used as evidence in open court, quoted in parliament or newspaper articles – it just needed someone to collate it all. People have generously handed over documents they had held on to since the 1960s because they wanted to have their stories told, while others have shared information on their own blacklist files. We could not have written the book without the generosity and support of literally hundreds of people too numerous to mention. You know who you are and we thank you all.
The constraints of writing a book mean that we will not have satisfied everyone. We apologize if certain aspects of the story are only briefly touched upon and that Court Orders have restricted the publication of some of the information we have gathered. This merely adds weight to our call for a fully independent public inquiry. If a freelance investigative journalist and an ex-construction worker with only partial access to the documentary evidence can uncover this amount of sordid detail, how much more would a public inquiry discover?
It was important to give everyone the opportunity to have their say and we feel we have produced a fair piece of investigative journalism. But journalism should not simply record events but, in the tradition of Upton Sinclair or Paul Foot, should strive to influence the agenda.
There is a genuine public interest in exposing the full story of corporate and state spying upon individuals involved in perfectly legal, democratic union activities. We hope this book will contribute to the ongoing debate: we’ve come a long distance but there is some way still to go.