WORKING for a trade union affords me the opportunity to meet some extraordinary men and women — working people who have fought injustice all their lives. 

Many were initially driven by their social experience and then developed a deeper political understanding of the world around them. 

One such extraordinary man walked into the GMB’s Glasgow office on Friday November 22 2013. 

John Gavienas had received a letter which asked him to provide his national insurance number. Concerned that it was a scam, he turned to the union for advice.

In fact the letter was from the Information Commissioner’s Office and I explained that his name must have been found on blacklisting files seized from the Consulting Association’s offices in 2009. 

Gavienas had worked as a boilermaker at the oil rig fabrication yard at Kishorn in Wester Ross, a facility which has been closed since 1987. 

Over 30 years ago he had been outspoken in two minor disputes over the undignified treatment of his fellow workers. In 1981 the entire workforce had been dismissed and then selectively re-engaged. Gavienas was not one of them. 

He never got a job in construction again and finished the last 10 years of his working life as a window cleaner in Glasgow. Like many others he wondered if he was on a secret blacklist but never knew. With the GMB’s backing he now has a claim at the High Court.

I relate this episode because there is a human face to the campaign for justice for those workers who have not only had their livelihoods robbed but their lives changed forever by a secret conspiracy of defamation. 

The construction industry blacklisting scandal is not a tale of a few bad apples but an entirely rotten system which operated in a supposedly advanced democratic state. It was literally carried out on an industrial scale.

I relate it too because of the apparent unwillingness of the SNP in central and local government to take action when it can against these companies, most of which continue to profit handsomely from millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to build public infrastructure projects.

Take the current procurement process for the construction of the V&A Museum of Design in Dundee. The two shortlisted companies, Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd and BAM Construction, are both up to their necks in the blacklisting shame. The latter is the preferred bidder. 

In the last week Dundee City Council has announced that the cost of the project has risen from £49 million to £80m. Almost all of this will be paid for from public funds. The Scottish government has already announced it will chip in an additional £10m on top of the £15m already committed. 

Most of the rest is coming from two public bodies, Creative Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund, with less than 20 per cent estimated to be raised from private sources.

Despite this, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wrote to the GMB in her final days as the cabinet secretary for infrastructure, investment and cities last October to say that, as far as this infrastructure investment in this city was concerned, it was nothing to do with her. 

“Dundee City Council is an autonomous body,” she opined.

The labour and trade union movement, including my own union, wants to see the project go ahead as part of an economic plan to regenerate Dundee’s waterfront. 

But we also want to see the leverage which projects like this offer seized upon to pressure companies like BAM to own up, clean up and pay up.

It is also being claimed that the V&A project pre-dates the Scottish government’s procurement guidance stipulating “exclusion from public contracts of companies which engage in blacklisting.” 

But in fact this blacklisting guidance was issued on November 20 2013 and the V&A construction contract was put out to tender on December 18 2013.

A new paper to be considered by Dundee City Council this week has a series of inaccurate statements about BAM’s record in the blacklisting calumny.

First of all it suggests that BAM Construction in Scotland did not use the services of the Consulting Association, and only engaged it “in other parts of the UK.” 

Even if it was true that only workers in England were systematically locked out of employment by a secret network of anti trade-union discrimination, that wouldn’t make it right — and such thinking serves as an indictment of nationalism. 

In any case, it is emphatically not true. BAM had no separate company for its Scottish construction business. At least two Scottish workers are among those Ucatt members with a High Court claim against BAM and its constituent elements. 

And former BAM Nuttall HR director Pat Swift, when giving evidence to the Scottish affairs select committee in 2013, made no distinction between Scotland and the rest of Britain, but said that it had used the services of the Consulting Association for all major projects.

Second, it is claimed that “all such usage ceased completely in 1998 when the UK Data Protection Act was passed.” This is also untrue. From files obtained from the Consulting Association we know that BAM group firms BAM Construction, BAM Nuttall, Edmund Nuttall, HBG and Higgs and Hill all paid quarterly and annual subscriptions to the Consulting Association right up until 2009. 

Moreover, in his evidence to the select committee, Swift confirmed that the Consulting Association was routinely called upon between 2004 and 2012 while he was BAM Nuttall’s HR director. 

Third, it is claimed in the City Council Report that BAM has “accounted” and “apologised” for its action and is willing to “compensate fairly … anyone who can show they have suffered any detriment.” 

Again Swift was clear in his evidence that there is no apology, just “regret.” 

In effect BAM’s position is to pay compensation if a court orders it to do so and not before.

But that brings us to the very real difference which the Scottish government and Dundee City councillors could make. It isn’t just the act of blacklisting which is shameful, it is also the cover-up. It is this failure to disclose the truth, even to the present day, which calls into question the fitness of BAM and their like to keep their snouts in the trough of public finance. 

John Gavienas, the 21 workers from Dundee and the hundreds of others from right across these islands whose cases lie before the High Court deserve justice from the law. But they also deserve action from those we elect. 

It is not good enough to condemn blacklisting but do nothing about it. 

Human rights and our democratic tradition are on trial as well as construction companies like BAM. 

It is our duty as a labour movement to challenge those in power and so win justice for all these working people who have been so gravely wronged in the past but also to build a very different society and economy in the future.

Richard Leonard is regional organiser for GMB Scotland.