Responding to reports in The Observer on 4 March that security services “gave data to a clandestine organisation funded by major names in building industry” and compiled a secret ‘blacklist’ file on Professor Charles Woolfson who researched health and safety on oil rigs, the Trades Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has called for firms that used information to blacklist trade unionists and academics, to be banned from public sector contracts.
Steve Hedley, a TUSC candidate in the GLA election, who was one of those named in the Consulting Association’s files and suffered four years without permanent employment, said: “Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidates standing in the GLA elections pledge that if we are elected in May we will oppose public contracts being signed with blacklisters by the London Mayor or any of his officials….
“It smacks of a sort of police state, almost with the police colluding with the employers to blacklist the trade unionists. Some of the people on that blacklist are just ordinary health and safety reps. You just wonder how far this goes.”
RMT President, Alex Gordon who is TUSC lead candidate in the GLA elections, said: “Trade unionists have known for decades, that shadowy organisations with links to police and security services colluded with bosses of some of Britain’s biggest companies to deprive workers of a livelihood, by operating illegal blacklists. It now emerges that the practice also spread to blacklisting professors carrying out research into the worst industrial disaster in the history of the UK oil and gas industry.
“Blacklisting trade unionists is the new McCarthyism. TUSC candidates will fight to expose it, end it and win justice for those who have been its victims. There must be a full public enquiry into the activities of the Consulting Association and Britain’s rotten corporate culture of blacklisting as a matter of public interest.”
