Files revealed during high court action show some employees were labelled ‘troublesome’ by union staff and were denied work by companies

Britain’s biggest trade union, Unite, is facing calls to set up an inquiry into claims that union officials gave information to a clandestine blacklisting operation funded by major firms and enabling them to deny jobs to certain workers.

Details of the alleged complicity have emerged in documents prepared for a high court action following which construction firms apologised and paid compensation totalling around £75m to 771 blacklisted workers.



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Previously confidential documents from the secretive operation suggest that union officials privately warned managers of large companies not to employ specific workers because they were deemed to be politically troublesome.

According to signed statements by managers involved in running the blacklist, trade union officials helped to get some of their own members excluded from jobs as they wanted to prevent disruption on industrial sites.

Files from the blacklist show that trade union officials described individual workers as “militant”, a “troublemaker”, or with a warning to be “careful”.

Evidence of the apparent collusion between trade union officials and managers has led a group of 41 blacklisted workers to call on Unite to commission an independent inquiry into the claims.

They said officials working for Unite, and another union that has merged with Unite, have been implicated in what amounts to a “running sore” for the trade union movement. “We are not looking for a witch hunt, we simply want answers into possible union collusion in order to avoid repeating mistakes of the past,” they added.

The ballot for Unite’s new general secretary closes on 19 April. Len McCluskey, the incumbent, said that if he was re-elected, he would “set up an independent union inquiry to investigate all evidence made available” to him about any officer collusion. “I will not allow any officer who has colluded in blacklisting to work for Unite,” he said.



Unite’s acting general secretary, Gail Cartmail, said: “Only a full public inquiry with judicial authority will fully explain the depth to which the state and employers colluded to deny construction workers employment.”

“Unite has campaigned legally, industrially and politically to win justice for blacklisted workers and to ensure the disgusting practice of blacklisting is ended once and for all. Blacklisting is an industrial crime, the blame for which lays squarely at the door of the construction companies.”



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More than 40 construction firms unlawfully compiled confidential files on the political and employment activities of more than 3,200 workers, some of them dating back to the 1970s.

Many workers had suffered long periods of unemployment as a consequence of being labelled troublemakers by the firms.



Daniel O’Sullivan, who was once chairman of the secret agency that operated the blacklist, worked for more than 30 years until 2008 as a manager in the construction industry. He said that as part of his job, he had meetings with senior union officials. These included representatives from Unite and the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT), which has merged with Unite.

O’Sullivan said his discussions “made clear to me that the union officials were also concerned to prevent unnecessary disruption on site. Occasionally, union officials would give me information concerning a particular individual”. He gave as an example a worker who was described on his file in 2005 as a “troublemaker” by a union official.



Another manager involved in running the blacklist was Dudley Barratt, who worked as the head of industrial relations at the Costain construction firm in the 1980s and 1990s. He said he was friendly with officials in a number of trade unions who appeared to be aware of the covert blacklist.

He added they “would occasionally tell me names of individuals who they thought should not be employed on sites, on the basis that there might be a risk of these individuals using the opportunity to cause trouble to undermine a project and the official trade union activities on that site.”

“Overall, I gained the impression that there was a quiet acceptance by certain construction trade unions of the [blacklist] and the ‘benefits’ of the checking service as such individuals could be disruptive of organised labour and the unions saw the benefit of having an organised site.”

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Mick Anderson is one of the blacklisted electricians who received compensation after being unemployed for many months. His file noted that a firm was told in 2005 by the Amicus union that he was “not recommended”. Anderson was a member of Amicus which later merged with TGWU to form Unite. The file also records another warning from the union to another firm two days later, to be “careful” about him.

Entries in the file on bricklayer Brian Higgins, who has also received compensation for being blacklisted, identify union officials as the source of information about his union activities in 1992, 2002 and 2003. In one, an official states that Higgins “is connected” to a rank-and-file organisation of builders that campaigned for better conditions.

The blacklisted workers want an inquiry by a legal expert to interview trade union officials and victims, and see if information was handed over deliberately.

