By Jamie Elliott
Community Links’ Aaron Barbour is never short of good ideas and his suggestion that I look into informal working on construction sites connected with the Olympics set me off on a really interesting investigation.
Aaron had suggested I look into whether informal working was going on within the massive 2012 construction effort.
First stop was the Olympic stadium, which is easy to get close to but nigh on impossible to access. Electrified fences and closely guarded turn styles keep the workers in and anyone who wants to talk to them out.
After cycling round the Olympic site a couple of times and only managing to speak to a couple of workers, I tried the East London Line extension site – where new bridges and track are being laid between Shoreditch and Dalston to improve links between north, east and south London.
It was much easier to talk to workers here – a lot of guys were hanging about outside the Dalston site, having a cigarette or helping direct traffic around the bottleneck the one way system. The first two I spoke to worked for Sky Blue, an agency which is part of construction giant Carillion, which is running the project along with Balfour Beatty. They were laying concrete along the new line and told me they were being faced with a pay cut from £10 per hour to £7 an hour if they moved on to the next job Sky Blue wanted them to do. One of the men said he was refusing to take the lower paid work but others said they had no choice because there was so little work around.
This pair also mentioned, almost in passing, a gangmaster who had been paying his team of fifeteen Indian workers only a third of what he was collecting for their work. Another worker said this gangmaster, Paul Singh, used to boast in the pub that he was clearing £6000 per week – over £300,000 over the year he was contracted to provide workers. At least eight other workers confirmed the story and told me which sub-contractor had used the gangmaster.
I knew the Balfour Beatty / Carillion consortium had made a commitment to using local labour as part of the deal which helped them secure the contract, so using labour from a gangmaster – who appeared to have made off with hundreds of taxpayers money – was obviously a big deal.
It turned out the contractor who used the gangmaster didn’t tell Balfour Beatty / Carillion or anyone else about what the guy had been up to, but quietly got rid of him shortly before the contractor’s work on the site was complete.
So the first Transport for London – who have overall responsibility for the site – knew about the scam was when I asked them to respond to the allegation of wrong doing.
TFL first of all said they could not be expected to know how much every worker was being paid, although they admitted they did not know whether or not the workers were getting less than the minimum wage. But after the story had appeared in the Observer, they told the Evening Standard that they were instructing Balfour Beatty / Carillion to carry out a full investigation.
One of the confusing aspects of this affair was the fact that these fifeteen workers had worked for almost a year for much less – perhaps as much as half – than other men around them doing the same concrete laying job. And yet, the contractor had copies of their passports, which TFL says they have seen, so there was nothing to suggest they were illegal workers.
It didn’t make sense. Why would they work for so long without complaining to anyone?
Finding the answer to that question is the subject of the next stage of this investigation. I’ll keep you posted.
