Using Violation Tracker UK to fight for workplace justice

In recent years, trade unions have turned more to corporate accountability research to address the declining power of workers in relation to the companies that employ them.

As these companies have grown, protections for workers have been eroded. New forms of precarious employment have distanced workers from the unions that could protect them. There are now whole sectors that have limited collective bargaining power.

This challenges trade unions to try new methods of reaching workers, through communities, through wider activism and through making connections with non-governmental organisations like ours.

Good Jobs First produce Violation Tracker UK, which is the UK’s first wide-ranging database of corporate regulatory infringements. Our data includes the outcomes of employment tribunals, companies that have been named and shamed for failure to pay minimum wage, and notices and convictions for health and safety offences alongside competition infringements, consumer protection offences, environmental breaches, care violations and more.

Users can freely search the database by company name to find a company’s history of regulatory breaches in the UK since 2010. It is also possible to search by offence, regulatory agency and more.

The database makes it possible to see which companies are the worst in the UK for certain regulatory breaches. It will come as little surprise to trade unionists that the Royal Mail has lost the most employment tribunals since 2017, that Network Rail have the worst safety record, and that Tesco has paid the most in arrears to workers for non-payment of minimum wage, because in these cases workers themselves have been on the frontlines opposing corporate misconduct.

The data supports these actions, showing that major industrial disputes of the last few years were not just about pay. Striking workers have fought to defend workplace rights which are so frequently being flouted by employers.

Despite the fragmented nature of UK labour market regulation, where the onus is almost entirely on individual workers seeking redress, the data enables us to evidence systemic breaches contained in employment tribunal and health and safety records. These breaches, such as regular unlawful deductions, failures to pay the correct holiday pay and abuses of working time regulations, are often left out of the picture.

Last year we launched Violation Tracker Global, which tracks the regulatory breaches of the world’s largest companies. As monopolies grow, keeping track of how multinational companies are operating in different regulatory environments can also help strengthen negotiating power and public support.

Over the last three years we have been exploring how to use our data to support workers and organisations fighting for better protections and against corporate exploitation. We looked at the differences between the US and UK enforcement regimes and the state of UK regulatory enforcement. We worked with other organisations to use our data, for example revealing that almost 200 care providers with a licence to sponsor migrant workers have broken UK labour laws in the last few years. There is more work to be done in identifying where rogue companies are taking advantage of major gaps and leniencies in the regulatory system, undercutting wages and driving down standards, and we are receptive to any ideas for collaboration involving regulatory enforcement.

We have also used our data alongside procurement regulations in the struggle for insourcing. Almost all the government’s strategic suppliers have breached UK law but the evaluation of risk in public contracting continues to ignore the risk to workers.

We offer training for branch reps in using the database to strengthen their campaigns. If your branch, union or organisation is interested in this training, or in collaborating on a specific project please do get in touch at maia@goodjobsfirst.org.

The database is free to use. Our UK work is funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and Network for Social Change. You can follow us on twitter/X or bluesky and subscribe to our monthly newsletter where we highlight recent additions to the database and our research.