Dave Smith & Phil Chamberlain
Blacklisted: the secret war between Big Business and Union Activists
New Internationalist Publications. 2nd edition, 2016. ISBN 9781780263410 £9.99
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Exposed, decades of denials, lies and deceit by construction companies as they blighted the lives, careers and families of tens of thousands of workers for objecting to deadly working conditions on the building sites around us.
Written both as a piece of investigative journalism and a testimony to the bitter struggle it provides personal accounts of resisting the vile practices of the Companies’ Human Resources as it lays bare the scale and persistence of the conspiracy detailing the role of large corporations, the state, the security services and police, and even the occasional trade union bureaucrat in the surveillance of a wide range of activists and through denial of work.
The victimised fought back.
The Blacklist Support Group’s determination and campaign eventually saw a High Court public apology [found here] sweated out of major construction companies that acknowledged the role of the Economic League, the Services Group and the Consulting Association bankrolled to systematically gather information, maintain and use secret blacklisting against trade unionists and others.
It documents the collusion that was suspected by all involved in the industry, it names names drawing upon extracts from blacklisted files and maps out the scale and extensive practices that these companies wanted to be “their dirty little secret”.
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