That’s an ideal. Back when there was some degree of honesty anywhere, even in government, if someone broke the rules it was often obvious. But the standard now is discretion when breaking the rules, followed by denial and quick destruction of evidence and legal stonewalling. If that sounds familiar, it is.
At the corporate level, a lot of it began with a surfeit of lawsuits against typically legal criticism. For example, if an employee was fired for stealing, yet used his former employer as a reference, and they told his potential employer why he was fired, they would get sued.
So most corporations refuse to give any references at all. But if an employee was particularly heinous, they have many ways of indirectly indicating that he should not be hired.
This just knocks it up a notch. There are innumerable lists in the “listverse” on the Internet. Vast numbers of them are little more than people’s names and are password bot protected. If say, 5% of the names on the very long list are union agitators, and the other 95% are random names, it would be a superb blacklist.
Say McDonalds got a whole bunch of new potential hires. Somebody in their corporate hiring office checks the list, then authorizes the hiring of the needed percentage of potential hires, not hiring the rest, which includes the union troublemakers. That should be invisible enough to escape scrutiny, as long as there is no direct computer “paper trail”. That is, no corporate computers were used.
The one employee, the list manager, lives in another country, and is on an obscure payroll.