Growing political concern has been voiced over blacklisting, a practice of mainly construction companies to place workers who have been active for unions on a blacklist of workers never to hire. A list of union activists was circulated by the Consulting Association (that also filed MP’s and academics like Charles Woolfson) to firms who subscribed to it. The list, first revealed after a raid in 2009, contained 3000 names of ‘troublesome workers’. In recent week, the Trade Union Congress passed a motion defining blacklisting as corporate bullying and demanding political action. A number of blacklisted workers, aided by the GMB, have launched a £600 million law suit for tort of illegal conspiracy against one of the biggest firms using the covert black list database, Sir Robert McAlpine. Opposition raised again as it became clear that the director of one of the firms using blacklisting was awarded a seat on the board of the Health and Safety Executive.
English: http://www.shponline.co.uk/news-content/full/pressure-builds-on-ico ...
http://www.hazards.org/blacklistblog/2012/08/
http://www.manchestertuc.org/news/822-illegal-corporate-bullying ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/mar/03/blacklist-files-oil-safety-academic
Focus on the practice of blacklisting: http://www.hazards.org/blacklistblog/
This article was published in the Collective Bargaining Newsletter. It aims to facilitate information exchange between trade unions and to support the work of ETUC's collective bargaining committee. For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org. All rights reserved. The ETUI is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
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