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SocietyOctober 14, 2016

He Aituā, Helen Kelly: a force of nature, a national treasure, my comrade and my hero

Contributing writer
kelly_godfery

Morgan Godfery pays tribute to his friend, the impassioned and inspirational workers’ advocate Helen Kelly.

Helen Kelly, the mighty trade union leader, the irrepressible campaigner, the bane of dodgy bosses everywhere, was my comrade and hero.

She is dead at 52.

Even when you know death is coming, when cancer invades the body’s cells and tumours announce their foul intentions, the event is still a shock. I’m not sure I can imagine a country without Helen Kelly nudging it along, prodding its conscience. I’m not sure I want to imagine a country without Helen Kelly.

Helen Kelly and Morgan Godfery

For any other person this might feel over the top. In an obituary lavish tributes are customary, but even the highest praise feels too small for Helen Kelly. In the Council of Trade Unions board room, on the top floor of Education House in central Wellington, the walls are lined with portraits of old white blokes looking over the skyline union members built.

That’s until you reach Helen Kelly’s portrait, the first woman to lead New Zealand’s trade union movement. Back in the day her father, Pat Kelly, a Liverpudlian and “ten pound pom” who went on to become the president of the Wellington Trades Council, would go around telling his comrades “she’s neat, eh?” after Helen was elected general secretary of the Tertiary Education Union.

I guess you could say trade unionism was in the blood, it was part of her whakapapa. “Our home was union central,” Helen told the Wellingtonian in 2010. Yet things might have gone the other way. Helen’s mother, Cath Eichelbaum, a Communist Party member who worked in the old Department of Māori Affairs, was part of the Chapman legal family, famous for producing two Supreme Court justices. Cath’s cousin, Thomas Eichelbaum, went on to become the country’s Chief Justice.

Helen herself trained as a lawyer, not that the establishment was ever for her. The Kelly family home in Mount Victoria was like a halfway house for visiting intellectuals, South African radicals, and kids who just needed a place stay. “Mum would wake us signing ‘wake up darlings from your slumbers,'” after Helen and her brother Max had given up their bedroom for one of the family’s visitors.

It was an early lesson in service and sacrifice. This is the astonishing thing about Helen: she was never self-centred, even going as far as talking about her health like a sympathetic observer might. “I’m lethargic, but the doctors are pleased with where I am,” she told me last year on a TV set, “well, all things considered.” Are you in pain? “Yeah, but the dak helps.”

Perhaps the first reaction to a cancer diagnosis is to turn inwards. Yet Helen saw a campaigning moment, using an appearance on TV3 to admit she was taking marijuana for pain relief and challenging politicians to improve access to medicinal marijuana. Granted, the law remains the same, but it felt like we crossed a threshold: if you’re suffering from cancer and taking marijuana to help cope, you don’t have to feel ashamed.

This isn’t to say Helen “won” every issue. She couldn’t, after a spirited campaign, stop Peter Jackson, Warner Bros and the National Government from stripping film workers of their work rights. Conditions were so bad on the set of The Hobbit that some actors were said to be forced to share contact lenses, yet without employment protections the actors – sorry, “contractors” – could do little more than leak to the media.

Or call Helen Kelly.

I suspect this loss changed Helen. It hardened her. And she didn’t lose again. “That woman Helen Kelly,” as one bitter employer put it, went on to save lives in the forestry industry and help transform New Zealand’s health and safety law. When travelling through Tokoroa Helen would stay with the Findlays, a whanau who lost their father Charles in a forestry accident in 2013.

 

Helen Kelly in 2011. Photo: NZ Tertiary Education Union
Helen Kelly in 2011. Photo: NZ Tertiary Education Union

“Unions must become public institutions,” Helen told delegates in 2015 at the last Council of Trade Unions conference she presided over. These were more than mere words. When Helen went to the West Coast to support the Pike River families, she never did so as the president of a private organisation that just happens to represent working people. She did so as the leader of the largest democratic institution in the country, the 360,000-strong Council of Trade Unions.

This is Helen: always there for other people. She was there for the meat workers in 2012, working with iwi leaders to negotiate a new employment agreement at AFFCO-Talleys. The iwi leaders at the table were so taken with Helen they invited her out fishing the next day. I’m told this is the highest compliment possible. She’d make tremendous company out on the boat. Or possibly on a hunting trip.

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“Hey mate, Helen here” – she’s calling from a treatment session in Auckland, catching her breath with each word – “can you call me as soon as you get this. I need to talk to you about the local elections.” This voicemail is saved to my phone. It captures something about Helen. Her fighting spirit, her phenomenal energy, but also the thing that’s harder to name. Her mana.

Not mana in the sense of status, but mana in the sense of force. Almost the metaphysical. Where did it come from? Whakapapa, yes, but also her partner Steve and her son Dylan. Helen was herself a “public institution”, almost a fact of national life, but her life and memory belong to Steve and Dylan first. They carry her mana. To them, our thoughts and love go. And to Helen there are only two words:

Solidarity forever!

Keep going!
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SocietyOctober 14, 2016

In her own words: Helen Kelly’s vision for the Labour Party

Guest writer
helen_kelly

The inspirational union leader and workers’ advocate has died aged 52. Today we republish her vision for the party that many hoped she’d one day lead.

The tributes are flowing in this morning for the formidable Helen Kelly.

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Helen Kelly in 2014. Photo: NZ Tertiary Education Union

In November last year The Spinoff invited contributors to write a passage they’d like to see pasted into Andrew Little’s first Labour Party conference speech as leader.

Helen sent us this:

‘Our vision of a good place to live and work’

Working people will be included in policies by Labour. We will ensure all workers, whether they work in forestry, retail or on our farms, are able to have a genuine say in the wages paid in the industry. We will legislate for genuine industry level bargaining so that issues like hours of work, wages, training and pay increases are discussed and agreed rather than set by each employer or left to the government to regulate.

The current model rewards the employer with the cheapest labour costs. It incentivises employers using zero hours, it incentivises employers to not invest in training but to steal others’ trained staff and it encourages employers to make workers work long hours without breaks and at the detriment of their safety or consideration of their families. Labour will stop this. Cheap employers won’t be able to compete on the price of the labour they rip off and good employers will prosper. That is the sort of future New Zealanders want – that is our vision of a good place to live and work – and we can do it. We can be a much happier, fairer, safer and economically secure country.

The current government designed the current model. This is why it removed the tea breaks. This is why it removed the obligation of employers to collectively bargain, this is why it has an open door migration policy and this is why this government is making zero hours lawful. It wants low wages to prevail. Under Labour we will restore the balance which is good for business as well as workers. We will encourage employers to be successful because they value and invest in their staff and are innovative rather than simply competing by short changing their workers.

We have seen how the current government policy works – meat workers at AFFCO are being forced to sign awful individual agreements even though they want a collective. They are being forced to accept big weekly reductions in wages and to accept variable shifts and no guarantee of hours. They are even being told they can’t meet each other outside work without the employers consent.

They are seasonal – if they don’t accept these new provisions, they have been told they will not get their jobs back. This is the type of employer the government likes and we don’t! Their employer is maximising its use of the current governments cuts to workers’ rights – and how does the government respond? Does it care that these workers – living in some of our most remote provincial towns – are having their wages cut by one of the richest families of this country? Does it heck: it made their boss a knight. Arise Sir Peter was its response. AFFCO are doing what this government has designed – cutting wages and taking more of the wealth these workers generate for itself – it’s by design!

Labour knows that fair incomes and decent work is not a zero sum game and we will be a government that works for everyone. We will build a country that is good to work in including for our young workers. Has the government’s current approach increased jobs or seen significant economic growth? No it has not – it is short term and has left more people jobless, vulnerable to insecure hours, untrained and under paid.

Labour will change this – workers and employers will be able to negotiate wages that share the profits of the industry. They will be able to negotiate hours of work that suit the industry but that offer security. They will get a tea break and lunch break, and we will provide incentives for employers to invest in training. We will make NZ a good place to run a business and a good place to work!

Society