The Autonomy of Labour Law, edited by Alan Bogg, Cathryn Costello, A.C.L. Davies and Jeremias Prassl. Hart, Oxford, 2015, 442 pp., ISBN: 9781849466219, £60.00, hardback. New Frontiers in Empirical Labour Law Research, edited by Amy Ludlow and Alysia Blackham. Hart, Oxford, 2015, 224 pp., ISBN: 9781849466783, £50.00, hardback.

Published date01 June 2016
Date01 June 2016
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12185
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12184
54:2 June 2016 0007–1080 pp. 449–458
BOOK REVIEWS
Blacklisted: The Secret War betweenBig Business and Union Activists, by Dave Smith
and Phil Chamberlain. New Internationalist, Oxford,2015, 272 pp., ISBN: 978 1
78026 257 4, £9.99, paperback.
This is a book that should be read by all those involved or interested in industrial
relations in orderto understand the problems and devastating eects of blacklisting for
the individuals concerned and for society generally. It represents a terrible indictment
of the construction industry, and a puzzle foranyone outside to grasp why labour can
be treated with such callousness.How and why are highly qualified individuals, clearly
committed to improvingemployment and working conditions, excludedfor ever from a
sector with often dangerous working environments, whichis constantly craving skilled
labour and has such low productivitycompared to other leading European countries?
Some of the answers to this are givenin the book; above all, one reason is that they are
trade unionists, and that many large construction employers appear to be anti-union
and haveconspired to keep them o construction sites rather than address employment
and health and safety concerns and grievances. The book is written by Dave Smith, a
blacklisted electrician, and Phil Chamberlain, a journalist, and aims to tell the story
of what has happened to blacklisted workers, drawing on interviews with over 100
blacklisted workers and their families and on the blacklisting files discovered by the
Information Commissioner’sOce (ICO) following a raid on an organization known
as ‘The Consulting Association’ (TCA) in 2009. The book is highly readable, fuelled
by justifiable anger, containing many personal details and incidents — a veritable
treasure trove for oral labour historians and a well-documented historical record of
the many events leading up to blacklisting and its repercussions, from the point of
view of workers themselves, and the blacklisting campaign.
Three themes run through the book: the blacklisting process and the campaign
that has gained increasing momentum against it; the construction sector and its
industrial relations systems, or lack of them; and the conspiracy to exclude workers,
which included the police, the security services and elements in the trade unions
themselves. It begins with the first of these,the blacklisting process and the campaign
against it, describing the background to the 2009 ICO raid on the TCA, whose Chief
Executive Ocer was Ian Kerr, now deceased. The TCA had taken over files from
the Economic League, an organization founded in 1919 to protect ‘free enterprise’,
which Ian Kerr had worked for and which was closed down in 1993 following a
parliamentary inquiry and exposure of the poor quality of its blacklist of leftwing
workers. TCA acted similarly as a covert vetting service and was funded by over 40
of the largest construction firms, including AMEC, BAM, Carillion, Balfour Beatty,
Skanska, Kier, Laing O’Rourke, Costain, Vinci and, above all, Sir Robert McAlpine.
C
2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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