Mike Treen

The agitator

Words: Rob Mitchell Image: Lawrence Smith

Mike Treen is wearing a moonboot to protect his fractured foot. A couple of bruised ribs mean it hurts to laugh. Which is a shame, because he laughs often. A man born to disagree, but who is by no means disagreeable.

The injuries are courtesy of the Israeli military, who pulled Treen and his fellow protesters off a fishing boat on its way to bust the Israeli blockade of Gaza in July.

‘‘The Israeli military doctor, from a few metres away, said ‘Take your boot off . . . OK, it’s just a strain’.’’

Laugh. Wince.

Israel called the action a ‘‘stunt’’. Treen smiles, admits the group were not surprised at the military response, and acknowledges the power of publicity for a people left without a voice. ‘‘But it only becomes a stunt because they [Israel] fulfil their sort of role in it. If we were allowed to have a right of free passage, we were delivering supplies . . .’’

Treen has been delivering stunts, publicity and power to people with little of it for most of his 62 years, as a social movement organiser, human rights activist and latterly as national director of Unite Union.

His many stories are filled with the language of the battler, the occasional expletive opening a wee door into hardscrabble suburbs of poor, working-class Auckland, but also meatworks and factories fulminating with the constant arm-wrestle for workers’ rights.

That struggle is in the DNA. His mother was from Blackball, the West Coast mining town that gave birth to the labour movement in New Zealand and the political party that promoted it. ‘‘Her dad was a socialist, with the socialist values of West Coast mining communities, unionism; she knew all the first Labour government people personally: [Paddy] Webb and [Bob] Semple . . .’’

She also knew pain, delivered often at the hand of an abusive, gambling husband. It was Treen’s first glimpse of the bully he would encounter so often in life.

But another family member demonstrated the value of fighting back. ‘‘I almost got it once, but my brother stood up for me, and the old man sort of looked at my brother, and he was a big lad, about 15-16, and he was growling, ‘You think you’re f...ing big enough to take me on’; he was going to give me a hiding, but he didn’t.’’

His parents separated when he was about 10, but life remained hard. ‘‘It was a rough family; growing up in Panmure and state-housing suburbs, then later on in One Tree Hill, a tough upbringing and we all had crosses with the law; my brother ended up in prison, my sisters in borstal.’’

Treen ended up ‘‘politicised’’. The 13-yearold boy who ‘‘religiously’’ read the weekly

Purnell’s History of the Second World War

became the agitating teen who visited Resistance bookshops and organised his classmates into action at Catholic boys’ school Marcellin College. He distributed a socialist newspaper and helped establish the Student Action Committee in Auckland.

He deemed his high school education over, and the college obliged, when he was expelled for organising a ‘‘strike’’ over a hair-cutting punishment of himself and fellow students.

But his education in agitation and harnessing the power of many was only just beginning.

He graduated from organising a handful of long-haired school students to supporting the mobilisation of 17,000 people in an Auckland march against the Vietnam War in 1971. ‘‘My first public speech was in front of 17,000 people. So I thought, we can do miracles.’’

There were more rallies later that year and into the next. Treen realised he had a talent for organising others. ‘‘You gotta motivate people, you gotta organise people; you’ve also got to do the mahi.’’

He would organise and motivate many, many more as he made his way through a politics degree at Auckland University and chanted, agitated and marched through some of the country’s most traumatic civil disputes, including Bastion Point and the 1981 Springboks tour.

The labour movement was at its height, workers’ rights pre-eminent. Treen worked in various meatworks, car plants and factories where unions held incredible sway – ‘‘you had a legal right to strike at any time, so every now and then there would be a blue over cold food’’.

But the tide was turning. Rob Muldoon was warning of ‘‘reds under the beds’’ and Treen could hear the tap, tap of those dancing cossacks closing in.

‘‘The SIS [Security Intelligence Service] would see it as part of their duty to warn the bosses about hiring left-wing people.’’

That ‘‘red’’ tide was pushed back by the party that had fed so hungrily from its waters, Labour’s Rogernomics free-market policies a grave injury to Treen and many others, made worse by the inability or unwillingness of the union movement to fight the changes.

‘‘A lot of workers felt let down,’’ he says. They were ‘‘humiliated’’ in 1991 when the National government’s Employment Contracts Act was passed, effectively decimating the unions.

‘‘There were calls for a general strike, hugely popular, but it was resisted by the central leaders of the union movement . . . who took a hard line against a general strike and sabotaged the organisation of it.’’

Unions were in retreat, and Treen on the run. ‘‘I was blacklisted like hell, couldn’t get a job anywhere. I even tried to change my name; I was lucky I got a job at a warehouse, working on my own.’’

Almost 30 years on, the union movement, apart from the odd highprofile strike by teachers and nurses, remains largely in the background. But Unite has done much in the past decade to bring it kicking and screaming back into prominence.

Built by Treen, Matt McCarten and others from the rubble of the Alliance Party, and initially funded by personal credit cards and re-mortgaged homes, Unite targeted the country’s most vulnerable workers.

‘‘We both thought, well what the f... are we doing? What’s our purpose in life? We wanted to reconnect with the people who we claimed to represent in the Alliance Party: the poor, the workers, the marginalised.

‘‘No-one was doing fast-food, no-one was doing cinemas, no-one was doing call centres

. . . so we thought well let’s just have a crack. They were being shafted; this is zero-hours territory.’’

It was new territory for unions too. Unite adopted ‘‘guerrilla tactics’’ that raised valuable publicity while it collected members and empowered the impoverished.

‘‘We used new campaigning stuff, town hall meetings, concerts in the park, rolling strikes; it just drove them [employers] nuts.’’

Unite sold popcorn outside cinemas to undermine revenue and lift its profile, placed a giant blowup rat outside major fast-food outlets and walked through SkyCity Casino with megaphones and whistles; in one campaign hotel workers refused to clean up ‘‘bodily fluids’’ left by guests, and in another, the union issued a press release highlighting an issue with fleas in hotel rooms.

The campaigns brought businesses to the negotiating table and better pay and conditions to thousands of workers.

That puts a smile on Treen’s face. But the hard work remains to keep the focus on employees’ rights and members signed on, in industries with transient workers and high turnover.

The struggle continues for a weary battler pondering his own legacy. ‘‘I think purpose in life has got to be bigger than self. Yes, you’ve got to look after yourself, yes you’ve got to look after your family, but I think purpose comes from having a bigger family, and the bigger the family the better the purpose.’’

‘‘I was blacklisted like hell, couldn’t get a job anywhere. I even tried to change my name ...’’