Blacklisting - it was for health and safety reasons

Update: Saturday November 21

The Guardian runs my feature today updating the various aspects of the blacklisting story; from the court cases to the pending legislation and the continued drip of information that the files are releasing.

Seventeen months after Guardian Work exposed blacklisting in the construction industry, new laws outlawing the practice are set to come into force, and next week 23 of its alleged victims will start their court cases.

But for electricians such as Colin Trousdale it doesn't mean the scandal is over....

Read on

Northern Voices follows-up today's story and Panopticon has a considered take on the latest developments. I'm also intrigued by its suggestion here of a particular project in this area.

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Yesterday building firm Skanska, one of those which subscribed to a secret intelligence-gathering company, today revealed the results of its internal investigation into the matter.

People Management Magazine Online reports that:

Building firm Skanska used an illegal blacklist of construction workers to vet employees for a history of violence and drug or alcohol abuse, an internal investigation has revealed.

Harvey Francis, executive vice-president for HR, told PM that it had subscribed to the list, which contained confidential details of 3,213 construction workers, “to ensure the safety of people working on our sites” – not to blacklist people on the grounds of trade union membership as reported in the press.

One person a week dies on a construction site in the UK so it is a laudable aim to put health and safety front and centre. However, many of the blacklisted construction workers I have spoken to (and whose files I have seen) have ended up on the system because they raised health and safety issues. A campaign group representing families bereaved because of deaths in the construction industry has spoken out specifically about this.

The report says that the Skanska investigation has led to:

"all white-collar staff were given training sessions on a new company code of conduct, which included guidance on employee referencing. A new position of data protection officer was created, and all of the 80-strong HR team were retrained on a new data protection policy – with yearly refresher courses planned."

It's pretty clear from what Francis says that there was a system-wide failure in the HR department but, the report says, no-one has been sacked. So in one case we have mistakes that have been proved and no-one gets the chop. On the other hand, false or irrelevant allegations are made and construction workers industry-wide are sacked. Somehow it does not seem that people are being treated equally.

The human relations departments in construction firms have been pretty succesful in avoiding the spotlight in this scandal. It is to Francis's and Skanksa's credit that they have been upfront about their investigation.

Concerns about how the HR industry has acted have been raised - it would be useful to know what steps other companies have taken to overhaul their HR departments in the manner Skanska has.