About Us   

The first meeting of what became the Trade Union History Project took place in the conference room of the New Zealand Engineers’ Union on 2 September 1987. The 23 unionists and historians present officially established the organisation and approved its incorporation. The inaugural committee comprised Francis Wevers (chairperson), Paul Tolich (secretary), Barry Tucker (treasurer), Margaret Long (newsletter editor) Barbara Fill, Anne Goodman, Richard Hill, Cath Kelly, Dean Parker and Pat Walsh (with Shirley Leitch of the Central Distribution Union joining soon afterwards). This committee determined on a five-pronged programme of activities for the new organisation. These were to:

• Foster and record the history of the union movement and participate in its preservation.

• Help establish a permanent file and video archive of the history of unions and their participants.

• Promote the production of the history of the trade union movement through print, oral and visual material.

• Work with other people and organisations interested in recording and maintaining permanent records.

• Promote training programmes for unionists and other interested people to team how to research and record the history of the union movement.

Within these five aims, the first priority was help recover trade union records, including minute books, diaries, press clippings, photographs, tapes and films.

The committee also elected six patrons: Sonja Davies (trade union leader and MP), Cohn Hicks (president of the PSA), Jim Knox (president of the Federation of Labour), Margaret Long (trustee of the Dan Long Library and equal-pay campaigner), Bert Roth (labour historian) and Margaret Wilson (lecturer in industrial law and retiring president of the Labour Party). They were later joined by left-wing activist Rona Bailey and trade union leaders Ken Douglas and Doug Crosado. In September 1988 Dave Diggins of the Communication and Energy Workers’ Union came aboard as the organisation’s auditor. He fulfilled this role until 1989 when he became the TUHP’s treasurer until 1993, after which he returned as auditor, a role he has continued to the present day.

The establishment of the Trade Union History Project was supported by the government of the day, and Minister of lntemal Affairs Michael Bassett awarded the new organisation $20,000 to help it get established a grant he increased during the following 1988—89 financial year to $27,500 to cover inflation and GST.

Francis Wevers brought to the first meeting proposals for a documentary film based on the working life of Jock Barnes and his role within the New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union between 1946 and 1951. Wevers and Dean Parker had already applied to the Short Film Fund of the New Zealand Film Commission for funding for the project. The TUHP took the project on board. The Short Film Fund provided an initial $5,000 and, subsequently impressed with the video extracts, it granted another $76,000 for the project to be completed.

Thus Shattered Dreams, a 46-minute documentary focusing specifically on the 1951 waterfront lockout, written by Dean Parker, produced by Francis Wevers and directed by both of them was released in 1991 as the TUHP’s first major production. This documentary has since become an iconic record of the lockout and events that caused it.

By the end of 1988 with membership close to 120, the TUHP had run a seminar on recording oral history and subsidised its first book — a $5,000 grant to Dunmore Press to subsidise its publication of The Luicifer, a book on the 1932 tramway industrial dispute in Christchurch, written by local bus driver Dave Welch.

On 13 July 1990 Richard Hill, Paul Tolich, Francis Wevers and Pat Walsh met with Michael Bassett to discuss TUHP proposals for commemorating 1990 in labour history. From these discussions Bassett agreed to grant the TUHP $60,000 towards the production of an illustrated history of working people and the labour movement in New Zealand. Stephen Eldred-Grigg was commissioned to research and write the script, and Cathy Marr to do the photographic research. The resulting book, New Zealand Working People 1890—1990, was published by Dunmore Press later that year.

In 1990 also, the TUHP decided on a major commemoration on the centenary of Labour Day, a decision given a substantial impetus by a further government grant of $20,000. From this the TUHP organised and ran an international conference, Culture and the Labour Movement (later anthologised in book form), as well as recreating, through the streets of Wellington, the first Labour Day parade of October 1890, along with an art exhibition and film festival. The success of all these ventures was a high point for the organisation.

By 1991 there was a new National government in power. It abandoned state support for the TUHP and passed devastating anti-union legislation in the Employment Contracts Act, which ironically put more pressure on the TUHP to assist unions suffering under this decree. In 1992-93 the organisation funded Peter Franks to work with unions throughout the country identifying and preserving historically significant material in their possession. Franks later wrote a pamphlet, Trade Union Archives: a guide to preservation, which was distributed to every union in the country.

Through the 1990s the TUHP continued to organise annual labour/trade union history seminars (with the exception of 1995), editing speeches from a number of them for publication, commissioning and subsidising book publications, awarding scholarships for postgraduate students (known from 1995 as the Bert Roth Fellowships), funding oral histories, helping to fund video production and assist with the transferring of film to video, and producing a regular newsletter.

The TUHP has also accomplished a miscellany of other feats. In 1991 it helped fund the production of a 1951 waterfront lockout calendar. In 1993 it was involved in the installation of a memorial to Samuel Parnell, founder of the eight-hour working day, in the Bolton Street Cemetery Chapel. Over the years the TUHP has also been involved in an Access Radio programmes and the creation of a Labour History Walk in Wellington. It contributed to a 1995 Labour Day concert in Wellington, the production of the promotional CD Choir, Choir, Pants on Fire, and the restoration of the Westport Miners’ Union banner.

In February 1997, sobered by the recent deaths of working-class stalwarts such as Max Bollinger, Noel Hilliard and Jack Locke, the TUHP voted to commit much of its remaining funding, $30,000, to finance Otago University graduate student Shaun Ryan to undertake a major oral history project carrying out extensive interviews with 30 retired and working trade unionists for an archive. Ryan spent some months travelling throughout New Zealand conducting these interviews in 1998 and 1999. In 1999 also, the TUHP received a $7,000 Award in Oral History from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage to enable Ryan to conduct interviews with ten prominent women trade unionists.

Partly because of dwindling funds and partly because many members felt the TUHP had possibly run its course in its present form, activists have recently debated the future structure of the organisation — and indeed whether it has a future at all. While committee members today still believe that the objectives of the organisation are still well worth pursuing, it is no longer the case, as it was when the TUHP was formed, that the trade union movement in general is under threat of abolition and the consequent loss of its records. While the preservation of union archives remains an important objective, it is not and never has been a sufficient focus to sustain the TUHP as an organisation.

For most of its existence as we have seen, the TUHP has managed to make its contributions to labour and trade union history from benevolent funding it received in its earlier years from government sources. This patronage ceased in 1990, and more recently the TUHP has had to cut its cloth by discontinuing its scholarships and grants and cut down drastically its commissioning and subsidising of books, video and film and oral histories. It has had itself to rely on securing funds from other sources to support particular activities.

Thus, the TUHP today essentially acts as a broker, locating finance for specific projects it then organises or supports. It no longer has the luxury of acting as a sort of trustee for funds held at its disposal. This has caused committee members, led by Colin Hicks, to suggest that the TUHP join with other parties to approach government to try to secure seeding money for a new labour history trust for the purpose of encouraging and promoting labour history scholarship and research. As of early 2006, these discussions are continuing.