Taking Out The Trash

Parliamentary debate on blacklisting

Michael Clapham has secured an end of day adjournment debate on Monday evening to discuss blacklisting in the construction industry. I'll be tuning in to parliament tv online (is there something better to watch at 1pm?)

Meanwhile Pits'n'Pots gets a local (ie Staffordshire) angle on the story and London Progressive Journal has piece by Unite's Steve Kelly.

It's not a million miles away

Read this fantastic piece in the Guardian yesterday on the train up to London.

It's about why the government's promise to end child poverty has failed told primarily through the experiences of a single mother-of-two who lives in Bristol.

I was all excited to be heading up to the Big Smoke (if you're in the sticks then seeing electric lights and horseless carriages amazes you). Having read the piece it made me very angry and quite ashamed. Need to put that anger to good use.

Donpaskini wrote a very good post taking apart Labour MP Tom Harris who made a recent foray into the world of young mums and morality. Tom doesn't seem to have any clear ideas about what to do other than be morally outraged (not at the poverty, mind you, but the having children bit). I wonder what he's got to offer Louise, who is the focus of the Guardian piece, other than indignation?

Blacklisting hotline starts

Rob Evans and I filed a piece for yesterday's Guardian's online edition as the ICO's hotline for workers who fear they have been blacklisted went live. (Ring 08456 306060 by the way and have your NI number handy).

Alex Ralph blogs on the issue and ties it in quite nicely with the miners strike anniversary and the Shrewsbury pickets campaign.

I'm indebted, as ever, to the TUC's excellent Risks magazine which rounds up some of the union responses to the story.

Bob Crow from the RMT talks about anecdotal evidence of his members having been blacklisted because of their union activities. Scottish TUC issued a statement. Unite talk about possible claims arising from this although other unions are a bit more coy because it's going to be difficult to prove. Unite have also mounted an internal investigation because of the suggestion that some of their reps may have colluded in the blacklisting. It may well be that this story, far from being a boost for unions, could well shine some light on activities which might make them some feel a little uncomfortable.

Sunshine Week

Like any journalist I'm a fan of Freedom of Information legislation and over in the States they run a fun week to promote access laws.
Perhaps we could adopt Sunshine Week over here?

I've got the Auge

I get to review a range of books for Tribune magazine - and usually you can tell what's coming before you open the first page.
Recent additions to my bookshelf have been I'm With The Brand (about, er, brands. In America this had a different, crapper, title), Secrets & Lies (about the CIA and mind control), the Post-American World (about how the American empire might renew itself) and A Billion Lives (by the former UN honcho Jan Egeland).
Good, snappy titles. All bar one had good research and an original story to tell. (Secrets & Lies was very disappointing).
Now I'm now waiting for a review copy of a new edition of Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity by Marc Auge.
An introduction to what?
Well I picked it out of the catalogue because of a summary by author Patrick Wight who wrote the quite marvellous The Village That Died for England.
Wrights says of Non-places:

“Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges — we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But only now do we have a coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on public and private experience. Marc Augé has become their anthropologist, and has written a timely and original book."

Sounds great. A little Iain Sinclair and a little Guy Debord and some anthropology.
But get yourselves a snappy title folks. I'm a child of the TV generation and if I can't graffiti it onto a bridge across the M4 it's not worth a damn.
*apologies for the appalling pun in the title.

Update: having looked at Patrick Wright's blog I found this post about Melvyn Bragg's brilliant In Our Time rather amusing.

Rise of the machines

Last summer I reported on a competition organised by the MoD on Salisbury Plain to enourage companies and universities to come up with a robot which could help the army fight urban wars.
My posts on this are here.
Last week the BBC reported on some of the projects the MoD was looking at funding generally and several competition winners had been given extra resources. It shows that the event itself was more than just a PR stunt  but a very serious attempt to rope schools, universities and small companies into defence projects.
Scientists for Global Responsiblity have just published a further piece by me on this.
Other items in their spring newsletter are:
*Dr Stuart Parkinson looks at the potential for a sustainable, low-carbon economy to be created through efforts to tackle the current global economic problems.
*Prof Sandy Halliday traces the evolution of the principles behind sustainable design, and argues for their much wider use.
*Social housing projects could learn from past successes Past collaborative efforts of architects and policy-makers have produced elegant social housing solutions by Kate Macintosh MBE Dip Arch.
*Dr Nick Ritchie outlines the serious flaws in the logic of nuclear deterrence upon which the proposed replacement of Trident is based.
Non-members can et a copy for £3.50 from the SGR.

Blacklist EDM and warm words

Er, just as it says in the title. 70 MPs (update 19.37 13/3: 76 now) have now signed Michael Clapham's Early Day Motion on blacklisting.

Ucatt has been looking using other mechanisms to raise the issue in parliament and one was questions to the leader of the House. Harriet Harman duely pledged to end the practice, reports Building magazine.

Update 13.3: in the House yesterday Harman responds to question from Michael Clapham with some warm words: "important issue", "totally opposed", "scurrilous activity". Anybody spot a pledge to actually do as the unions are asking and bring in the regulations required to make blacklisting illegal in her answer? It's not actualy Harman's call anyway but BERR minister Peter Mandelson - and more specifically Pat McFadden.

In an earlier article Building magazine also quoted a lawyer on the potential exposure of companies involved in the scandal.

John Armstrong, partner at law firm CMS Cameron McKenna said the firms could face potentially unlimited claims if they were proved to have behaved in a discriminatory manner against workers on the list. He said: “If someone believes they’ve been unfairly dismissed or overlooked for work then they can bring an action, certainly. It becomes a discriminatory matter.”

I've piece on the issue in tomorrow's Tribune.

In other news: My colleague Rich Cookson has spent the last few months working on a programme for C4's Unreported World about the Congo.

In the jungles of North East Congo, the Unreported World team uncovers evidence that the Lord's Resistance Army - one of the world's most brutal rebel groups - has begun a new campaign of terror, and talks to survivors with stories of unimaginable horror.

Worth tuning in for.

Downfall moves

I've moved my Downfall mash-up to here.

Two wheels bad

Brilliant post over on the Green Bristol blog doing the simple thing of walking the city's cycle routes and photographing the lethal combination of obstacles which any cyclist has to negotiate.
It's all very well to talk about making it a cyclnig city but actually doing it is another thing.

Blacklisting edm

Thirty one MPs have signed Early Day Motion number 1020 which calls on the government to take action on blacklisting.

The text of the EDM is:

That this House is alarmed and concerned to learn from the Information Commissioner's report that the blacklisting of trade union members is widespread in the construction industry; condemns the major construction contractors who subscribed to the Consulting Association and also provided it with information about workers and employees; notes that many of the companies who donated to the Consulting Association are currently engaged on publicly-procured work projects worth billions of pounds; considers that there may be legal implications where for example an employee or worker believes they were dismissed because they were on the list and requests that the Information Commissioner gives a reasonable time for people to make the appropriate checks; and calls on the Government to enact immediately legislation to prohibit the compilation of a blacklist containing the details of workers and employees with a view to them being used by employers or employment agencies to discriminate in relation to employment and to make it a criminal offence for an employer to commission such information.