Obituary: Ken Douglas (1935 - 2022)

John Kerr writes on the legacy of trade unionist Ken Douglas. First published in October 2022 for volume two of The Commonweal.

The late Bob Crow, General Secretary of the British Rail and Maritime Union (RMT), once said: 'if you fight you might lose, if you don't fight you will lose'. It's a saying we would do well to keep in mind as we look back at the career of Ken Douglas, who died on 14th September 2022.

The obituaries and tributes published in the mainstream media were largely positive, extolling the virtues of the man who went from being a truck driver to leader of the Wellington Drivers' Union by the age of 23, and eventually became the inaugural president of the Council of Trade Unions in 1987. But much of the coverage airbrushed over the defining moment of Douglas's career, the failure to resist one of the most devastating attacks on organised labour in the history of western liberal democracy as Jim Bolger's National Government successfully passed the Employment Contracts Act (ECA) in 1991.

The ground for this piece of legislation had already been laid by the fourth Labour Government, which had begun the process of dismantling the national wage fixing mechanism and started the march to so-called enterprise level bargaining in 1987 with the Labour Relations Act. Douglas failed to lead a concerted opposition to Labour's neo-liberal agenda and in 1991, when a National government emboldened by the zeitgeist of the immediate post- cold war era came for the unions, he was sorely lacking.

In April of that year hundreds of thousands of New Zealand workers took to the streets in what has been described as the 'largest display of popular outrage in New Zealand history'. Mass meetings of workers, beneficiaries and students called for a general strike. Douglas failed to heed them and, together with the leadership of the teachers', nurses', public servants', engineers', postal and financial workers unions - in almost every case acting without a clear mandate from their rank and file - quashed the call for a general strike at a CTU special affiliates' meeting. Douglas's excuse was that this was a fight that could not be won and that a better strategy was to hold on until Labour was re-elected. 

Marshal Ganz defines leadership as 'the practice of empowering people to achieve shared purpose in conditions of uncertainty'. We don't know if a general strike would have successfully stopped the ECA in 1991. We do know that 1991 was not 1913 or 1951. In 1913 the union movement had been too small to defeat the state. In 1951 Fintan Patrick Walsh calculated there was too much to lose and sacrificed the wharfies. In 1991 650,000 workers had nothing to lose that the state wasn't going to take from them anyway. 'If you don't fight you will lose...'

We do know that the architect of the Act, Bill Birch, expected and was prepared to concede much of its content had public resistance been strong enough. We do know that the fifth Labour government repealed the ECA but kept much of its anti-strike provisions. We do know that the union movement has never recovered and Aotearoa has amongst the lowest percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining in the OECD.

In the conditions of uncertainty that prevailed in 1991 Ken Douglas, a self- professed communist and the leader of organised labour in Aotearoa, chose not to fight. And, in the words of Bob Crow, we all lost.