UKHamlet's Blog

Ian Kerr, private investigator, could be named more appropriately, but only just. He is to be prosecuted by the Information Commissioner for allegedly selling private information to companies in the construction industry who wanted to vet potential employees.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner says he seized documents on individuals that had comments appended such as: “communist”, “definite problems, no go”, “lazy and a trouble maker”, “do not touch”, “orchestrated a strike” and so on.

Kerr kept an illegal intelligence database on over three thousand individuals, of which the commission said: “This is a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. Not only was personal information held on individuals without their knowledge or consent, but the very existence of the database was repeatedly denied.”

So, here we have a man trading illegal information to companies on individuals who were participating in perfectly legal activities such as trade union membership being brought to book. It’s probably the tip of the iceberg though. An employer I know has been approached on a number of occasions by investigators who have offered services of this kind. How serious they were, I have no idea, but their existence and this case leads me to believe this is the norm rather than the exception.

The construction industry is particularly hairy arsed and most of the people at the top of the ladder are incredibly thick: classic examples of the buoyant characteristics of faecal matter. So getting caught with their dicks in their hands is par for the course and not particularly surprising. The Tarquin and Rodney set that run the City, the banks and the blue chips are not so stupid. They have the common sense to cover their tracks and not employ dumb-arses like Kerr.

The truth of the matter is the board rooms of Britain are populated by men (and a few women) who are of a similar political mind. Their social standing is an irrelevance, but a disproportionate number of them are from similar social backgrounds, mostly what used to be described as the old ruling classes. The latter is increasingly becoming less the case, but the former is entrenched. You simply do not see anyone with a left leaning outlook in positions of responsibility in these companies. There are virtually no exceptions to this rule.

Now, there may be many reasons for this, not least the simple fact that if you are of the left you probably do not attempt to climb the corporate ladder, but surely there might have been a few exceptions to that rule. Or even one.

When was the last time a leading banker, industrialist or anyone at the top of British business was criticised or complemented for being too socially responsible? How many companies have policies that make Trade Unions irrelevant? Because that’s the crux of this matter: if Trade Unions didn’t need to exist, they wouldn’t.

Trade Unions exist as clubs where people get together and use their joint leverage to get the best deal for themselves that they can. Nothing much wrong with that really, is there? That, surely, is how capitalism operates. If you can get, say £700k a year for doing nothing after being the biggest fuck up fairy in history – fair enough.

Now, we’re not talking about that here – we’re talking about men and women struggling to make ends meet. We’re talking about people who can’t meet the mortgage, because they don’t earn enough. We’re talking about people who find themselves without a job because decisions made by idiots in suits went Pete Tong.  That’s why we need Trade Unions, because companies are operated by people who believe that the only way to make a profit is to do it at the expense of the people who actually do the work.

I remember the hue and cry when the minimum wage was brought in. Small businesses, it was said, would not be able to operate with such a restriction. Thousands would go out of business, we were told. Remember we’re referring to people who earn so little that they are unable to afford the basics of life: some to live, clothes on their backs and food in their stomachs. My attitude was that if a company could not afford to pay their workers a decent living wage, then they are not a viable company in the first place and should not exist. The same applies to bigger companies who pay as little as they possibly can to their workforce, reserving their better rewards for their managerial tiers – the corporate pit bulls who keep the workforce in place, and the real rewards for those who are at the top.

This culture of paying the minimum needs to be turned on its head and changed to one where the standard is paying a decent living wage for those at the bottom of the tree. By a decent living wage I mean enough to pay for the wage earner to clothe, house and feed themselves with a little left over to enjoy life, without having to work until you drop. Is there anything wrong with that?

I can hear the naysayers bleating about competitiveness. If they paid decent wages, they say, they would go out of business because they’d be undercut by someone else. This is the same argument as the one about the minimum wage. We now know that didn’t happen. This is also why Trade Unions exist and why prosecuting these companies to the fullest extent possible under the law is essential. It is also why the government needs to revive its law prohibiting black lists.