Better-trained delegates ‘would benefit workers’

Press, 12 February 1986, Page 12

Better-trained delegates ‘would benefit workers’

Auckland Better-trained union delegates would benefit employers and workers, says the man who spent 59 days investigating industrial relations at Marsden Point, Dr Martyn Finlay, QC.

He told the Institute of Professional Engineers in Auckland that most fulltime union officials were trained in the "university of hard knocks” and would not take kindly to their leaders being replaced by academic dons. Dr Finlay was delivering the Newnham Lecture at the engineers’ annual conference.

He said the delegates were open to the charge often levelled at professional soldiers that they were prepared to fight the last war - still striving with outmoded strategy for victories already conceded.

In studying the fiveyear history of the Marsden Point refinery expansion, with its continually recurring dispute, disruptions and stoppages and the calculated differing strategies tried by the construction consortium to achieve industrial harmony, one fact was constant.

Although important questions of principle and practice deeply divided managers and workers, each needed the other and neither could survive alone.

“The sharper the skills each brings to confrontation the more the contest will be confined to the main issues and not straggle into side-alley skirmishes and debilitating

guerrilla war,” he said. “I feel the unions too readily go for broke with an all-out assault, when a more moderate and gradual campaign would be just as effective and less wounding to all in the end.”

Although a few delegates mentioned receiving brief instruction at their union branch office, none claimed adequate training for such an important job. Dr Finlay said secondtier trade bargaining, possibly fostered by the freemarket philosophy urged on unions by the Government and set not by rela-

tivities but by plant productivity, imposed extra demands on delegates. “No longer is it sufficient for the trade union bureaucracy to follow one or two high-flying or wellmuscled leaders,” he said. r