Agency workers have no legal protection against blacklisting by multinational firms, according to a decision in the Central London Employment Tribunal on Friday 20 January. The court found that engineer Dave Smith had been blacklisted because he raised concerns about asbestos on building sites and because of his trade union activities.
Firms actually admitted that their managers had supplied the malicious information in Dave Smith’s blacklist file (collated by the Consulting Association) in a signed statement to the court. Evidence given under oath shows that spies attended union meetings and gathered information about people outside work. Ex-police officer Dave Clancy, Head of the Investigations Team at the Information Commissioners Office, and the man who led the raid on the Consulting Association premises and who discovered the blacklist, said, “There is information on the Consulting Association files that I believe could only be supplied by the police or the security service.”