Taking Out The Trash

Could McAlpines be the first firm taken to a tribunal over blacklisting?

Update 9.07am: Piece in The Guardian today about a demonstration taking place this morning outside the Olympic site. Interesting quote from one organiser:

"We are targeting the Olympic site because it is the highest profile construction project in the UK," said the spokesman, who asked not to be named for fear that he will be blacklisted (my emphasis) by employers. "Across the country construction workers are concerned they are not getting a fair deal. We will be calling for 100% direct employment on the Olympic site and we don't want to see any agency workers."

More coverage here and in the Morning Star.

Meanwhile union official Michael Dooley has just issued a press release announcing what looks like the first employment tribunal claim arising out of the construction industry blacklisting scandal.

The release says:

A former Bricklayer who was named on the Construction Blacklisted because of his Trade Union activity has made the first claim to the Employment Tribunal. Michael Dooley has last week 27th April 2009 registered a claim against major contractor Sir Robert McAlpine after recently receiving official confirmation of his 16 page Blacklist file

The Tribunal office in South London has accepted his claim and should hear Dooleys case in a matter of months. The case centers on a Documentation that was seized by the governments Information Commissioner when officials raided an office in Droitwich in the West Midlands occupied by the Consulting Association in March 2009.

Director of the Consulting Association was Ian Kerr. Kerr kept files on over 3,000 building workers who where trade union members, this file referred to as a Blacklist was supplied to many major building contractor one of which, it is reported was Sir Robert McAlpine. Contractors paid an annual subscription reported to be £3,000. Requests for information on ‘subject’ was made the Consulting Association’ provided the information at a charge of £2.20p a time.

Dooley lodged the claim as soon as he was aware that his name was on the file, his documentation runs to some 15 pages of information dating back to 1977 and ending in 1999, shortly after he became a Full Time Official of a Trade Union in London.

Dooley said ‘we stood up to bullying subcontractors and fought for decent wages and conditions when it was right to do so.  I heard stories of a Blacklist but it was a situation where either I accepted the unacceptable and keep my head down or say no that not right”

Dooley added ‘ I wanted to make sure that conditions where safe and wages where paid correctly, there is inevitably a conflict with some employers. So I regularly varied my details including my union, my name, National Insurance even my accent, but it is the more sinister information contained on my Blacklist that I am very angry about information of a personal nature, more than just my employment record.  My file contained personal information, some of which must have originated from Government departments and other information that was alarmingly incorrect.

An Employment tribunal may not have the jurisdiction to hear Dooleys claim because of time limits on bringing claims. However if what Dooley said is found to be true that he was refused work on several McAlpine sites after being involved in an industrial dispute on one of their sites it could be embarrassing to McAlpines. The question remaining  will be why was a reputable major contractor involved in the practices which could bring so much disrepute to them and to the industry?

ENDS

When I contacted McAlpines about the original blacklisting story I got a swift and straight  'no comment'. I expect the same here until / if this goes to court.

Update: Story also covered by Contract Journal and Heating and Ventilating Net.

BBC blogging pt 2

Well, 90% of what I said ended up on the cutting room floor mainly because, I think, I spoke a little too rapidly and my sentences were too long.

However, you can read about the BBC West Politics Show on blogging and there is also a links to the iPlayer record of it as well.

My main point was that blogging has become an increasingly popular news source for journalists (because it's quick and easy and confers a veneer of expertise) but for bloggers to get their stories accepted requires the mainstream press to valdiate them. (cf McBride and smeargate).

And too many people are on the wrong side of the digital divide for blogging to be anything other than a useful additional tool for journalists and politicians at the moment.

Bath & Wilts blogging: your starter for 10

BristolKRS posted a great comment to a post of mine from a few days ago bemoaning the limpid blog scene in Bath & Wiltshire compared to Bristol.

I've reposted the comment below in case you missed it.

As for building a better local blog scene or community or whatnot, I think that once you've found other sites locally, the linking up and cross-fertilising comes naturally. The Bristol blog scene is after all as atomised and at times as discrete as any other grouping of people or organisations linked only by geography.

The intersecting interests of the Bristol bloggers (often in relation to the shared aspects of their blogging - a sense of place, and from that, issues such as local government and politics, planning issues, an incorrigible disdain for career politicians at all levels tempered by a willingness to enter into discussion with them, and so on) I think is simply an example of the way strangers on the internet come to interact with each other after the initial dance. Every blog post heralds a negotiation, a negotiation over agreement and disagreement; whether blogger A agreed with blogger B in the past over issue C is neither here nor there once they're onto issue D. The style and grace with which each blogger addresses the issue is as individual as is possible, and will be seasoned with all manner of variables - mood, timing, off-stage and unstated motivations (a family crisis, perhaps, or a lack of time to spend blogging in detail due to problems at work), personal beliefs, political alignment, an open goal for a cheap one-liner...

Of course, all of these things are to a greater or lesser extent applicable in the 'real world' too; it's just that this being a written medium, it lends itself more concretely to form and structure.

Erm, rambling a bit there.

Some practical suggestions for kickstarting a Bath/Wilts blog scene:

# Put together a long list of Bath & Wilts keywords - places, people, issues - and methodically search for blogs writing about them - use the blog-specific Google search, as well as searching individual blog platforms like Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, LiveJournal etc. Don't forget to search through tags and categories too.

# Use the same keywords to search through the microblogging & tumblelogging platforms and RSS management social networks - Twitter, Jaiku, Blip.fm, FriendFeed, HelloTxt, Plurk, Tumblr etc - this should harvest a few more local or local interest bloggers via their profiles.

# Use a blog reader like NetNewsWireLite (free) to manage subscriptions to all these blogs so you can keep abreast of what's being written without having to methodically visit each one directly.

# Make sure you cross-comment and cross-link in comments on local issues across as many of these blogs as possible (in a way that can't be construed as spam!)

# Maintain a thorough blogroll covering local and local interest blogs, and encourage your fellow bloggers in Bath/Wilts to do the same - and contact your local dead tree media and get them to publish a local blogroll on their website (a la Evening Post: http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/Bristol-bloggers/article-769023-detail/article.html )

# Create catchy local memes that grab your fellow bloggers - like TBB's Red Trouser Gate, which, you might say, definitely had legs...

# Blog in a manner which lends itself to crowdsourcing, and invite input from readers and other bloggers.

# Plug other blogs when they're writing good stuff, as well as your own - especially when commenting on big hitter non-local blogs, or forums etc.

# Tag your own blog entries methodically!

I'm sure this is all stuff you're already doing, but maybe not. Best of luck!

Forecasting government action on blacklisting

Tribune this week carries an article by me reading the runes on how the government might proceed over the blacklisting scandal.
If you're a glass-half-empty person then the government is preparing for a long consultation in the hope that the issue will go away/an election will take people's minds off it.
If you're more of a half-full person then the signals from Brown et al are that the necessary legal changes are ready to be made once a few hoops have been jumped through.
My original article to Tribune was more on the empty side but it's come out in the editing as more positive. Well, you pays your money etc etc.

Meanwhile: no sign of my book review on Jason Cowley's The Last Game just yet but the digested read is: "Unmissable for Gooners, unbearable for Liverpool fans and unecessary for all those uninterested in sport."

Predicting swine flu through Google

I've been meaning to post about the new UK-edition of Wired magazine but the usual things got in the way.
Suffice to say I was impressed with the first issue. Not overwhelmed, but certainly enthused by its intelligence and the luxury of its presentation.
Not overwhelmed because you expect a launch issue to blow your socks off. It's six months down the line that the quality shows through. You imagine that Conde Nast are in for the long haul so let's see what happens by issue six.
What did spark me to finally getting round to this was an item I caught today on their web site about how traffic analysis of Google searches pre-dated media reports on swine flu. It has interesting implications for journalists (and business and spooks) who want to get the jump on imminently breaking events.

Blogging and the BBC

Just done an interview with Dickon Hooper from the BBC West's Politics Show for a piece this Sunday about politics and blogging.
Passing swiftly over my meagre contribution, look out for James Barlow and Kerry McCarthy MP who are must reads if you are at all interested in Bristol bloggers and politics in particular.
Meanwhile I was interested to see Freelance Unbound celebrate a huge rise in his/her/their Technorati ranking. Up some two million places. Go Freelance Unbound.
So, of course, I had to check out my own ranking and I think 816,035 is pretty reasonable, um, based on  nothing more than it's below a million.
(That's enough stats, ed) Need to start putting together an article for the Guardian's Work section on people who staff complaint lines which should be done tonight and then heading to London tomorrow to the studios of This Morning.

Update 1: Technorati's top blog by authority is the Huffington Post (Iain Dale is 2,500ish - watch out Iain, I'm catching you up).

Update 2: kind of appropriate that this is the topic for my 200th post.

We're all doomed

According to reports, seven people from Wiltshire being tested for Swine Flu (aka: the end of the world as we know it).
It's great that the cases timed themselves just right the weekly newspapers. How irritating would it have been to have found out on Thursday that Wiltshire was about to be wiped out by this deadly diseases.
A Very Public Sociologist has a nice take on the media's latest outbreak of hysteria.
Meanwhile, I'm just about to got out and take my turn on the barricades. This is one Wiltshire village which won't get infected.

Update: The Daily Mash, as ever, has the news that matters.

Update II: Fleet Street Blues has an excellent primer for journalists on how to cover this story. Of course if, like this freelancer, you're trying to pitch ideas which don't involve people wearing face masks you know that newsdesks at the moment have a one track mind. Still, gives me a chance to finish my review of Slow Tech.

Update III: in defence of the media, by Charlie Beckett from POLIS.

Firstly, I think it is the media’s job to panic. Government would love to keep everything nice and calm. It  doesn’t want to be rushed into expensive precautionary measures. Surely, it is journalism’s job to challenge the authorities to come clean about the dangers and to make them share their thinking and information with us.

The wasteland that is Wiltshire's blogosphere

I spoke earlier with a BBC reporter who is researching a piece for The Politics Show about blogging.
I mentioned that in Bristol, while traditional print media was declining, bloggers were having some success filling the gap when it comes to holding people and organisations to account.
See this for instance.
But as you go further east, while the print media is similarly tardy, the blogosphere becomes ever more quieter.
There are now parts of Wiltshire, patricularly on the Hampshire border, which are a wasteland as far as traditional and new media are concerned and it's just the good old parish magazines left.
So is our new unitary authority, which serves a population of over 400,000, getting an easy ride or the press it deserves from the print media?

Hat tip for the BBC contact to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal

Blacklisting in publishing

Interesting snippet from an interview in The Guardian with Claire Walsh - long-term partner of the writer J G Ballard.

It says:

When they first met, Walsh was politically engaged on the left. "My contribution to the women's movement was to try to organise trade unions at publishing companies where I worked to get women better paid. I lost my job over that and was blacklisted."

You can read the full interview here.

PM on blacklisting: let's consult again

At Prime Minister's Questions yesterday Michael Clapham asked Gordon Brown about the prospects for a change in the law to make blacklisting illegal.

Q5. [269364] Mr. Michael Clapham (Barnsley, West and Penistone) (Lab): The Prime Minister will be aware that the Information Commissioner recently found concrete evidence that blacklisting was widespread in the construction industry. Given that there was a consultation exercise in 2003, does he agree that it is now time to bring in the regulations to prohibit blacklisting, rather than—and before—going to a further consultation?

The Prime Minister: I am, as are the whole Government, very concerned by the evidence uncovered by the Information Commissioner about the re-emergence of blacklisting in the construction industry. In 1999, we established a power to introduce regulations to outlaw blacklisting, and we also consulted on draft regulations in 2003. Evidence at that time suggested that blacklisting had been eradicated but, given that there is new evidence that that is not the case, we are looking urgently at what we can do. We will assess whether the 2003 regulations, amended as necessary, should now be introduced to the House of Commons.

Update: UCATT has just issued a press release which takes a more positive line on Brown's comments (perhaps to paint him to a corner) and reveals that former minister Ian McCartney, who intoduced the original legislation, is now in favour of a ban.

An extra from the release says:

In response to Mr Brown’s statement Alan Ritchie General Secretary of construction union UCATT, said: “I am pleased that the Prime Minister has clearly indicated that blacklisting will be banned.
"It is monstrous that in the 21^st century the majority of major construction companies were engaged in blacklisting. They were content to deny work simply because of a persons union membership or because they had tried to improve site safety.”  ... 
Meanwhile Ian McCartney the former minister, who in 1999 was responsible for introducing the Fairness at Work Act, has written to UCATT expressing his full support for the regulations to outlaw blacklisting being enacted at the earliest opportunity.
Mr McCartney, said: “The Government now has to hand the evidence required to prove the existence of blacklisting in the construction industry and that the commitment to enact the relevant sections of the 1999 Act should be implemented without delay.”

 
A piece I have just written for Tribune takes up the same theme. A BERR spokesman told me that the gobvernment was planning to issue a consultation document in the summer. Whether that counts as "urgent" is one thing - whether another around of consultation is needed is another.

My first couple of pars of my article are below.

The government looks set to carry out a consultation on possible changes to employment legislation to outlaw blacklisting.

It follows a raid earlier this year by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on a firm in the

Midlands

which compiled files on trade union activists. Investigators also uncovered invoices from some 40 construction companies which subscribed to The Consulting Association.

In a House of Commons debate a month ago, employment minister Pat Mcfadden, said he and his officials would be studying the evidence seized by the ICO closely and would “come to a conclusion in the near future”.

Now a spokesman for the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform says that it “will hold meetings with interested parties though April and issue a consultation document in the summer”.

Next month Ian Kerr, who ran The Consulting Association, is due to appear before Macclesfield Magistrates Court charged with offences under the Data Protection Act. Kerr kept files on more than 3,000 people in total with detailed information on around 1,600.

ENDS