Finding a workable peace

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Vital export markets at times depended on the level-headedness of Jim Newman and Tom Skinner.

They both have memories of long days and nights as mediators trying to cool down warring sides in industrial "blues" as perishable exports lay on the wharves.

The pair are among the last six members of the Employment Tribunal due to hand in their warrants on Friday after ruling on thousands of personal grievances and other disputes put before them under the old Employment Contracts Act.

Mr Newman and Mr Skinner served as Labour Department mediators long before the tribunal was established in 1991.

Another retiring member, Mary Hall, once held a warrant as the department's first female factory inspector.

Both Mr Newman and Mr Skinner have retired from the tribunal before, but they were recalled two years ago for what were meant to be brief stints at clearing a "tail" of cases left over from the old legislation.

This was to let the Employment Relations Authority make a fresh start under a new law with wider powers to investigate workplace problems unable to be resolved by a separate mediation service resurrected by the department.

Although it took longer than expected, the tribunal is leaving the authority with fewer than 40 cases nationally to attend to, out of 41,000 in the past 11 years.

It is almost half a century since Mr Newman and Mr Skinner, son of former Federation of Labour president the late Sir Thomas Skinner, first worked together serving their country.

In 1953, they were shipmates on the Navy cruiser Black Prince when it sailed to Britain for the Queen's Coronation, before escorting her back to New Zealand for her first royal tour.

Both men now live in Orewa, where Mr Skinner will work for a law firm while Mr Newman tries again to retire in earnest, vowing to keep fishing even if Wellington phones again to request his services.

They each recall times when they had to use all their powers of persuasion to coax unions and employers into settling differences while the fate of perishable export cargoes hung in the balance.

Mr Skinner reckons he must have clocked up more flying hours than Nixon-era United States troubleshooter Henry Kissinger while trying to settle a national dispute which began at the Gear meat company in Wellington in the early 1980s.

It was one of the first disputes over redundancy pay and the Labour Minister, Jim Bolger, appointed him to chair a compulsory conference as refrigerated ships were on their way from Britain to collect the season's meat kill.

"We got a settlement a week before the ships arrived - I managed to settle that by awarding two or three weeks' [redundancy] pay."

One of Mr Newman's toughest assignments was a strike at the Sealord fish company in Nelson, when he presided over a 29-hour negotiating talkfest before reaching a settlement just 90 minutes ahead of a shipping deadline.

"There was a hell of a lot of stress. One of the union negotiators had a heart attack and it didn't stop us talking."

Late-night sessions in hotel bars sometimes achieved the best results - "when the parties had had a few beers and were not on their high horses".

As tribunal adjudicators in more recent years, the pair have had to sort out heart-rending disputes on a smaller human scale, with the Employment Contracts Act offering potential redress to all employees.

Before 1991, the Labour Court was the first point of adjudication and was open to claims only from union members, and then usually only if unions decided to take legal action.

Company managers now have as much right as blue-collar workers to remedies in industrial rather than common law, and Mr Skinner recalls finding for the son of a small business owner who was being treated poorly as his father's employee.

But Mr Skinner, who has also worked at various times as an industrial relations manager for large companies such as the Fletcher group and supermarket owner Progressive Enterprises, believes he has shown employers and workers an even hand: "I went through my decisions and found the ratio was 48 to 52."

Asked which group held the slight edge, he replied: "That's for you to guess."

Mr Newman once ruled decisively in favour of a North Shore City Council sewer patrolman, Eric Hobbs, who was sacked after sending a volley of letters to a suburban newspaper criticising senior council management.

He ordered the council to reinstate Mr Hobbs after drawing on a legal precedent from Canada in an absence of case law dealing with whistleblowers in this country.

But 10 years on, Mr Newman remains the butt of good-natured ribbing by colleagues for his finding that the worker "attempted to tiptoe through tulips of expression - but he forgot he had his gumboots on".