Today is the anniversary of the first of 22 days of strike action by GMB members at the Great Western Hospital (GWH) in Swindon, one of the earliest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) build and operate hospitals, and only the second opened by Carillion. This long running industrial dispute between the union and Carillion, over the failure of the company to recognise GMB, the unfair holiday system, and the culture of management bullying, which included years of covering up a system of shakedowns and extortion by supervisors, who terrorised the mainly South Asian women workforce into giving gold, money and other valuables in exchange for shift changes, overtime or holiday approvals. This extortion had been reported to Carillion in at least 2007, and the company was aware of the accusations at director level in at least 2009. Continue reading
Tagged with Carillion
Blacklisters should be barred from public contracts
Ian Lavery’s speech in parliament on blacklisting (abridged from Hansard)
The blacklisting of trade unionists is an unfair and insidious practice that involves the systematic compilation of information about individual trade unionists by their employers and recruiters in order to discriminate against them, although not just because they are members of trade unions.
There are people on blacklists who are not members of trade unions, but who have merely been to their employer and exercised their rights under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, as Dave Anderson said. If there is something wrong in the workplace, there is a duty under that Act to report it. As far as we are aware, people have suffered the consequences of doing that. Continue reading
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Carilllion’s failure of corporate governance
Today’s report in the Observer concerning the scandalous failure of care at the Surgicare centre in Hertfordshire, run by the services group Carillion, makes somber reading. Three deaths of patients who had been admitted for routine treatment prompted an independent report before Christmas, as the Observer recounts:
the report also contained the admission that nurses dealing with the case at the privately run centre had needed a ventilator at 8.30am the day before the patient died, but “no machine was available”. That admission, along with the report’s further revelation that clinical medical records are missing and that the resident medical officer at the Surgicentre did not ask for a more senior doctor to attend to Ms Mansi as her health deteriorated, has provoked her brother, Michael, to demand the closure of the centre, which has been at the centre of a series of scandals over the past year. Continue reading
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Ten years of Carillion putting profits before patients at PFI hospital
This week marks the tenth anniversary of Swindon’s Great Western Hospital (GWH) opening in Swindon, one of the earliest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) build and operate hospitals, and only the second opened by Carillion.
The anniversary was marked today by a dozen GMB shop stewards protesting outside, highlighting the long running industrial dispute between the union and Carillion, over the failure of the company to recognise GMB, the unfair holiday system, and the culture of management bullying, which included years of covering up a system of shakedowns and extortion by supervisors, who terrorised the mainly South Asian women workforce into giving gold, money and other valuables in exchange for shift changes, overtime or holiday approvals. This extortion had been reported to Carillion in at least 2007, and the company was aware of the accusations at director level in at least 2009. Continue reading
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How the blacklisting scandal operated
The evidence given to the Scottish Affairs Select Commitee by Ian Kerr, former Chief Officer of the Consulting Association, about the unlawful blacklisting activities of major construction firms has revealed on the dirty underside of bullying bosses, prepared to ruin the lives of thousands of workers.
A total of 44 building firms paid an annual fee initially of £3,500 to check information on his database, plus a fee of up to £2.20 per name they run through The Consulting Association.
As Labour’s Jim McGovern put it, the result of that check would decide whether a worker “would be able to put a meal on the table that week.”
The “information” passed on to possible employers ranged from who a possible employee lived with, one was recorded as “obnoxious hard case”, while another file read “wrote letter to Crawley Observer”. Continue reading
