Tag: Nick Kelly

Page 7 of this Rail and Maritime Union newsletter reports on the Tramways Union election and looming industrial dispute at Go Wellington.

Tramways Union: from new driver to union president in 18 months

My first year or so on the Wellington buses I was just learning the ropes. Firstly I had to learn all the bus routes. Then I had to remember to stop and pick up passengers. Thirdly I had to relax driving something the size of a small building around the narrow hilly streets of Wellington – many of which are narrow in the car.

Unionism played a prominent role in the life of the bus depot. As mentioned in my previous post, at the time I started there were two unions (one brought in by the company) trying to sign up new drivers. Our first couple of weeks training were held away from the bus depot. Our trainer was clear when asked about the union situation – “don’t join the tramways union, filthy Phil is no good.” Filthy Phil was the long serving secretary of the Tramways Union. He was well known for wearing shorts and jandals all year around. He’d been the secretary at the time of the bus company being privatised, where the union had against the odds held on to penalty rates and other conditions of employment. Not surprisingly, he made a few enemies within the bus company.

My first involvement with the Tramways Union was giving evidence in the Employment Relations Authority that during training the company had promoted one union over the other. The Filthy Phil quote was included in my evidence. The Tramways Union eventually won the case and the other union were no longer on site.

My first drivers stop work union meeting was an eye opener. It had been some years since the Tramways Union had held full branch elections, and a number of drivers were irate. Further drivers were very angry about the company trying to attack penal rates. Phil attempted to run this meeting amid constant heckling, in particular from one vocal driver called Josie Bullock who seemed to have a real axe to grind with the union. The purpose of this meeting was to approve claims for the next bargaining round. At the end of the meeting they were nominating members of the bargaining team. I hadn’t really thought about it, but before I knew it one of the drivers had nominated me. So a few months after starting I was representing drivers at negotiations.

The first bargaining meeting was interesting. The company presented their claims, which from a driver’s point of view looked like the script of a bad horror movie, where conditions were slashed and where the company would shift the balance of power firmly to the employer and a long way away from the drivers. Examples of this were the reports, complaints and enquiries procedure in the collective. The existing clause had a robust process for investigating complaints which incorporated the principles of natural justice. The company proposed to replace this with wording that would have made it much easier to sack bus drivers on flimsy complaints. As a negotiating team we worked hard to stop that. We also tabled our own claims, which included a significant increase to all printed pay rates in the agreement. By the end of the meeting it was clear we were miles apart.

At the start of the next negotiations, the union decided to meet a few hours beforehand to plan our response. Phil was half an hour late. We tried to call him but he wasn’t there. Kevin O’ Sullivan the union president and Graeme Clarke from the Manufacturing and Construction Union (who was advocate for the workshop workers) went around to Phil’s house. When they got there they discovered he had died.

Phil’s funeral in June 2008 was well attended, and buses in the city stopped for hours. Phil had played a massive role in the Wellington Tramways Union, and there was concern about what would happen to it now he was gone.

Negotiations continued, and we as a bargaining team made some progress on getting the company to moderate their position. However getting movement on pay increases was slow. Mediation services got involved with the hope of bringing us together. However we felt it was likely that industrial action would follow.

At first I hadn’t seriously considered running for the union executive. Kevin O’Sullivan the president had become acting secretary and was considered the front runner for the role. Former union president Morris Dawson had joined us on the bargaining team, but he didn’t want to be more than a site delegate at that time. Chris Morley was considering running, but was more interested in the Vice President role. Kevin O’Sullivan asked if I’d consider running, and my initial response was that I was too junior. But I thought about it. I then remembered that my old adversary from the Labour Party, Paul Tolich, had once been the Tramways Union President. Shortly afterwards I decided to run.

Karori Depot bus driver and friend Alan St John. After the 2008 Tramways Union elections Alan joked “*Chris Morley, Kevin O’Sullivan and Nick Kelly, the bloody Irish Catholics have taken over the union*“

I was elected by a fairly sizeable majority, as were Chris and Kevin. The negotiations were progressing, but we still hadn’t lifted the pay offer to an amount that drivers would accept. My first few weeks as Union President were about to become very busy.

Earlier posts in this series:

Why Trade Unionism

“Its a shit job, it pays shit money and if you don’t like it you can fuck off” – My introduction to bus driving

Earlier Blog posts about Nick:

“Its a shit job, it pays shit money, and if you don’t like it you can fuck off ” – My introduction to bus driving

In April 2007 I became a bus driver in Wellington. A job which originally I thought would last a few months ended up being a five year assignment.

My induction from the depot manager Bruce Kenyon was a great introduction into the working class. His words to us new drivers were “Its a shit job, it pays shit money, and if you don’t like it you can fuck off.”

Why did I become a bus driver when I finished University?

I have been asked this question many times, and given various answers over the years. Well in an exclusive to this blog (which I have been told is all about me – yeah take a look at the blog name haha), I will give the real reason.

At the end of 2006, I finished up as Students’ Association President. I had various offers of jobs, mostly through connections I’d made in the university. These offers would have given me some good career paths into the public service, or further within the university sector. I even had some options to pursue a role using my history degree for one public entity. I do wonder what would have happened if I’d followed one of these paths instead. But 24 year old me had other ideas.

In early 2007 I was still very much a follower of socialist politics, and had only been kicked out of the NZ Labour Party a few years prior. I had some earlier experience working at the ferry terminal in Wellington as a student, where one of my jobs was driving luggage trucks on and off the boat. But this was next level.

My usual car is a 1982 Toyota Starlet which you can follow on Facebook. So driving double axle buses through a city with notoriously narrow hilly streets was a challenge. In my second week on the job I managed to demolish a cleaning shed at the depot, learning that in large diesel vehicles, you need to wait for the air to build up before you move.

Within 18 months I was voted one of the top three bus drivers of the year in Wellington. I had regulars who would bring me coffee and biscuits, even the odd offer of weed (I didn’t accept). It became a job were I made life long friendships and really grew and developed as a young adult.

Capital Times on Nick being voted “Go Wellington’s best bus driver”. 19-25 November 2008

Why did I decide to go this way? In early 2007, Stagecoach Wellington (soon to become NZ Bus) decided to change all the drivers’ shifts. The aim was to cut penalty rates for drivers. In the late 1980s, the government deregulated the public transport sector. The result was councils having to privatise the bus services and run competitive tendering processes. In most cities drivers faced job losses and significant cuts to pay and conditions. In Wellington, the Tramways Union, (founded when the city still had a tram network) managed to hold this off. One reason for this was the trolley bus network, which created a barrier to entry for bus companies. Instead of breaking up the city network and having companies undercutting each other on tenders (and cutting drivers pay to cover it), in Wellington, Stagecoach and later NZ bus kept all of the CBD networks till 2018. The other reason drivers in Wellington maintained their penalty rates and other employment conditions, was that the vast majority of drivers belonged to the union.

In 2007 there was an attempt to break the union. Another union was brought in and they offered an inferior collective agreement where there was no penal rates or other conditions, but had a marginally higher hourly rate. Few drivers bought into this, despite the company actively pushing them. The shift changes made in early 2007 were designed to cut hours back so there would be less overtime, thus encouraging drivers to give up penalty rates. This didn’t work.

Fellow socialist Don Franks suggested I work on the buses for a bit. He’d been talking to a driver called Chris Morley who was active in the union. They thought the job could do with a firebrand who wouldn’t be afraid to lead the drivers into battle, and that I was the perfect candidate.

They weren’t wrong…

Previous posts in this series:

Why Trade Unionism

Earlier Blog posts about Nick:

Why Trade Unionism

Trade Unions are in their simplest form, people working together to achieve a common interest. The concept is nothing new, as the story of Spartacus from Roman times shows, people throughout history have stood together in solidarity. Collectively people are stronger to stand up to power structures than they are as individuals.

Industrial trade unionism that we know today is barely 200 years old and came out of the industrial revolution. When people moved from rural based peasant society to urban industrial capitalism, the working class was formed. This economic system meant people to survive had to sell their labour power to capital. Exploitation, unsafe working conditions, child labour and other terrible working conditions were common. The response of working people was to act together to demand better working conditions and better wages.

The Tolpuddle Martyres story of workers trying to organise in early 19th century Britain was a significant moment in trade union history. Unionism was initially illegal in the UK and most other industrialised nations. In Tolpuddle six agricultural workers were arrested in 1834 for attempting to organise and were sentenced to deportation to Australia. Mass protests resulted in the six being pardoned two years later. Through these sorts of actions, eventually it was accept that unionism and workers organising collectively was inevitable under industrial capitalism.

Celebrating Martyrs – History Workshop — The Tolpuddle Martyres

Many of the current global union organisations are products of the early to mid 20th century. The late 19th and early 20th century is the era that the modern trade union movement grew and made most of its political gains. Unions became a significant industrial and political force who often fought long hard struggles to improve the lot of their members.

Trade unions have a place and an important role in improving our working lives. Things that many of us in the developed world take for granted today such as weekends, sick pay, health and safety standards, anti discrimination laws, the end of child labour and countless other working conditions are the results of often long hard struggles by unions and their members.

Since the 1980s union membership has been on the decline globally. The official union/left response to this has been that this was the result of Neo Liberalism and attacks by the right. Certainly, the end of the post war boom and the attempts to offset this through Laissez-faire economics made life tougher for unions. However it is very easy to claim unions were victims of a right wing attack, rather than look any deeper.

Austerity and the free market economics we’ve lived under since the 1980s has held down wages and have failed to achieve the significant economic stimulation promise. But unions and the political left generally have not had a coherent response or proposed alternatives to this. Responses have been either to accept the changes and wonder why workers turn away from the organisations. Alternatively unions have harked back to the good ol’ days and proposed solutions that effectively ignore a) the causes of the post war boom to end b) development and changes in technology and c) solutions that in many cases weren’t that effective when they were in place 40 + years ago.

This is the first in a series of blog posts about my time working in the union movement. Like earlier posts, it will talk about my life and involvement with events. From this perspective, I will also talk about where I see the unions and the future of work. I will be challenging in these posts. But I have no intention of writing a series of articles arguing ‘unions are moribund’. But nor will it be a series of posts filled with glib cliches about workers solidarity and references to 1930s folk songs. These posts will will express my views, without sugar coating or spin. These posts will record certain events from my perspective (including photos and media). My hope is it will add to a useful discussion about the future of work, the future of collective organising and how to achieve a better working life for everyone in the future.

Earlier Blog posts about Nick: