KEY POINTS:
Helen Kelly was out of New Zealand for two big recent events - the announcement that she will be the next president of the Council of Trade Unions, and the announcement that resulted in her partner losing his job.
She is back from a conference in Berlin and is happy to talk about her ambitions in the country's top union job.
But she won't talk about Steve Hurring, the adviser to David Benson-Pope who telephoned Environment Ministry chief executive Hugh Logan about the links communications manager Madeleine Setchell's partner has to the National Party.
Mr Hurring, as adviser to the minister, lost his job the day Mr Benson-Pope lost his.
Helen Kelly, aged 42 and the mother of a 15-year-old son, has been with Mr Hurring, a former Engineers Union official, for five years. She followed the political storm online from Germany and Wigan, where she went to catch up with relatives of her father, Pat Kelly, who died in 2004.
Kelly snr was the firebrand secretary of the Wellington Cleaner and Caretakers Union and a Labour Party activist and that makes Helen Kelly a member of trade union royalty. She replaces Ross Wilson, who is retiring and will become chairman of ACC.
Addressing the plight of the low-paid will be one of Ms Kelly's priorities once she takes up the fulltime post at the CTU in October. "We don't need low wages in this country. There's no excuses for it. People should be able to go to work, work their hours and have a decent standard of living at the end of the week."
She also wants to boost union membership, which she says has the effect of improving the lives of employees whether or not they belong to a union.
"All workers benefit from union membership and a large number of people who are not in unions haven't deliberately made that choice. Either the structure of unions or the access to unions is not conducive to them joining."
But chief among her priorities in the 350,000-strong organisation (from 39 affiliated unions) is to get a much stronger industry emphasis on wage bargaining. And she wants a law change to advance it.
"I think the economy needs an industry approach to bargaining. I think the Employment Relations Act has failed in that regard."
In industrial relations parlance it is called a Meca - a multi-employer collective agreement - and with Government backing it has become more commonplace in the health sector, where many employers negotiate the one agreement.
Ms Kelly says it has advantages for both employees and employers - for employees more certainty and consistency of wages and conditions around the country, and for employers removing the need to compete on wages.
Ms Kelly said an important case this week in the Employment Court concluded that there was no obligation on employers to conclude a multi-employer agreement if it had been initiated by workers, and that was contrary to the intention of the act and needed to be changed.
While she grew up at the feet of Wellington's most militant unionists, Ms Kelly cut her union teeth in the NZ Educational Institute and the Association of University Staff, where she has been general secretary.
The conference she attended in Berlin was of Educational International, a global education organisation.
Berlin has special importance for Helen Kelly. Her mother is an Eichelbaum (a cousin of the former chief justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum) and her family were German Jews, many of whom were killed.
When in Berlin she went to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp about 40km out of Berlin where about 5000 political dissidents and trade unionists were among those who died.
"So it was an incredibly emotional thing to go to Berlin and to see the trade union history. "Berlin was beautiful but [it has] that dark side."
