Building solidarity at the flax-roots: standing committees for women, Maori and Pacific Island members inside the Wellington Hotel and Hospital Workers’ Union, 1979–1989

Abstract

The Wellington Hotel and Hospital Workers’ Union successfully increased its membership participation and membership solidarity during the 1980s. It did this by implementing a union newspaper, delegate structure, delegate education, stopwork meetings and standing committees for women, Maori and Pacific Island members. We know that women’s structures increased female participation and leadership in trade unions, bringing about a partial ‘gender revolution’ by the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on a framework of union power resources, this article shows that despite some initial resistance implementing separate structures for Maori and Pacific Island members, as well as women, further increased Maori, Pasifika and women’s participation and leadership in the union, and led to increased union activism on social issues.

Keywords:

• union power
• women
• Maori
• Pacific Island
• participation

Notes

1. My apologies to Lévesque and Murray; I have conflated resources and capabilities in this exploration of the WHHWU.

2. Oxenbridge pays attention to Pacific Island members.

3. Unions did not keep records of Maori and Pacific Island members.

4. Scant research has been done on Catholic members of trade unions, and what there is, discusses an earlier historical period focused on conflict between Catholics and communists (Reid 2006).

5. Casual workers.

6. These issues were reiterated by many women who attended the weekend meetings organised by Sonja Davies in the late 1970s to promote the Working Women’s Charter. Working Women, September/October 1978.

7. Kohanga reo were established in the 1980s to immerse infant to school-aged children in te reo Maori. Maori language programmes were also instituted in primary schools.

8. Police raided the homes of Pacific Islanders who were suspected of overstaying their temporary work visas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cybèle Locke

Cybèle Locke is a New Zealand history lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She wrote Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand, published by Bridget Williams Books in 2012, which explores how working-class unionists (including the organised unemployed) negotiated neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and welfare retrenchment during New Zealand’s third depression. She is currently working on a biography of Auckland trade unionist and communist Bill Andersen. Her recent works include ‘Māori Sovereignty, Black Feminism, and the New Zealand Trade Union Movement’, in Carol Williams, ed., Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism, University of Illinois Press, 2012; ‘Solidarity Across the ‘Colour’ Line? Maori Representation in the Maoriland Worker, 1910–1914’, New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 48, no. 2, 2014 and ‘Rebel Girls and Pram-Pushing Scab-Hunters: Waihi ‘Scarlet Runners,’ 1912,’ Labour History, no. 107, November 2014.