Why Should Firms That Spied on Unions Keep Government Contracts?

[SHRED]

Well they should not.
But in this pro-corporate Federal government we have I am not going to hold my breath.

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Why Should Firms That Spied on Unions Keep Government Contracts?
By Mike Elk February 24, 2011

Earlier this month, Lee Fang of Think Progress wrote an investigative piece on how the Chamber of Commerce had hired a private security firm to spy on union leaders and their families.

Lee discovered through emails obtained by ThinkProgress that the Chamber had hired the law firm Hunton & Williams in October 2010. Hunton & Williams then solicited bids from several companies to illegally spy on unions and other opponents of the Chamber of Commerce. As part of the bidding process, the law firm paid the firms to conduct initial spying on union leaders, their families and even their children.

Several of the firms involved in the spying had in the past received government contracts. As investigative reporter Justin Eliot of Salon dug up, one of the firms, HBGary, had won $3.3 million dollars worth of federal contracts for various federal agencies since 2004. Likewise, investigative reporter Marcy Wheeler of FireDogLake found that another of the firms involved, Palantir, had received $6.6 million in federal contracts since 2009.

This led Wheeler to wonder whether Palantir might be worried about losing their government contracts for spying on federal workers. Indeed, laws do exist on the books that prohibit contractors who break the law from receiving government contracts. So will the companies that spied on union leaders in violation of federal lose their government contracts?

“Very unlikely,” says federal contracting expert David Madland, director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress. “Look at BP. They cause massive environmental damage, kill workers all the time with their poor safety records, but yet they are still getting government contracts. While there are laws on the books to prevent companies like BP and others who break the law from getting government contracts, the government lacks the tools and the appropriate standards to enforce these laws.”

CONTINUED:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6999/why_firms_that_spied_on_union_activists_will_keep_their_government_con/

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[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. If the spying is not illegal, then why should there be consequences?

If it is, there are already laws that allow companies to lose contracts. The cited headline is misleading