The Construction Industry Blacklists

This article follows a documentary trail from Unite's Legal Department in 2009, through internal union inquiries, Westminster meetings, Parliamentary debates and High Court litigation, to the inquiries which followed. It raises a straightforward question: what did people inside Unite, the wider trade-union movement and prominent Labour politicians already know about allegations of trade-union complicity in blacklisting, what did they do with that information — and why has there still been no transparent public accounting of what happened? The present Unite inquiry is not simply an inquiry into whether construction workers were blacklisted. That has long been established. The issue it was tasked with examining concerns alleged conduct by trade-union officials — including collusion, the handling or suppression of blacklisting information and related official conduct. I am not suggesting that everyone named below possessed the same information or reached the same conclusions. ...

This article sets out a series of questions which I am putting directly to Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham, Legal Director Stephen Pinder and the legal team conducting Unite's Independent Blacklisting Collusion Inquiry. I remain a member of Unite. I have spent more than twenty years providing the union with evidence about construction industry blacklisting and attempting to establish what happened to the workers affected. Before considering what Unite has done with that evidence, it is important to understand something which has been evident for at least the last thirteen years. There was not simply one construction blacklist. The evidence I have obtained over the years points to at least three different mechanisms through which information about construction workers was shared. Three different blacklisting systems 1. The Consulting Association The Consulting Association operated a centralised system between participating construction companies and the Consult...