Tom Skinner

Sir Thomas Edward Skinner (18 April 1909 – 11 November 1991) was a New Zealand politician and Trades Union leader.

Sir Tom served as President of the Auckland Trades Council from 1954 to 1976, and President of the New Zealand Federation of Labour from 1959 until 1979. Skinner was known as a conciliatory and accommodating political leader, and in the 1970s he was seen as the voice of unionism in New Zealand. He served on several international union forums, including a spell as a member of the body controlling the International Labour Organization. He was instrumental in founding the Shipping Corporation of New Zealand, and was knighted in 1976.

Early life Skinner was born in Mangaweka in 1909, the third child and eldest son in a family of five. His father was a South African-born plumber (also Thomas Edward Skinner); his mother was Australian-born Alice (née Chalk). The family moved to Auckland when Skinner was five, and he attended Bayfield school in Herne Bay. After leaving school he became an apprentice plumber, and established a plumbing business after finishing his apprenticeship. An accident on a motor-cycle left him unable to continue this work, and he had several other jobs until his health enabled him to return to plumbing. It was during the course of one of these jobs, as a milkman, that Skinner was first exposed to industrial action and union politics.

Skinner married Martha May Wangford in December 1931. In December 1937, the Skinner family became the first tenants of a state house in Coates Avenue, Ōrākei. Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage helped carry furniture in through the front door (as he had with the first state house in Miramar, Wellington in September). This marriage was to produce one son but end in divorce. His second marriage to Mary Ethel "Molly" Yardley on 17 October 1942 resulted in a daughter and another son.

Union involvement

Skinner became secretary of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Plumbers Union in 1940, and soon became involved in other smaller unions such as the Auckland Musicians Union, and also with the New Zealand Labour Party. In 1944 he stood unsuccessfully for the Auckland City Council on a Labour Party ticket. In 1946 he was Labour candidate for the Tamaki electorate, though had initially hoped to win nomination for the safe seat of , winning the marginal seat by a slender margin. Skinner was resentful towards Ritchie Macdonald who won the nomination for the Ponsonby seat leaving him with the more marginal seat of Tamaki. Labour was defeated in the following election in 1949, and his seat was lost to National's Eric Halstead. He stood for the seat again at the next election in but was again unsuccessful. Skinner declined a request to stand for parliament again in the seat at the .

Skinner returned to his union career, becoming one of the new leaders of the movement after the disastrous 1951 Waterfront dispute. In 1952 he was elected vice president of the Auckland Trades Council and became president two years later, a position he retained for over 20 years. In 1959 Skinner was elected vice president of the New Zealand Federation of Labour and became president on the death of Fintan Patrick Walsh in 1963. As a leader, he was more conciliatory than his firebrand predecessor and encouraged several disaffected unions to rejoin the national body.

Skinner's conciliatory style served him well during the following years, as the late 1960s saw a rise in union restlessness with a government-controlled wage-fixing system. While he lost the vote on some key union policies, his strategy of directly approaching employers and individual unions to get them to work towards compromise solutions was frequently far more effective than his opponents' calls for the widespread use of direct action. By the late 1960s, collective bargaining was a well-established part of industrial relations. Skinner's 16-year leadership of the FoL was marked by his attempts to find consensus and avoid division wherever possible — traits possibly born out of the aftermath of the 1951 dispute. By the 1970s, Skinner was seen as the voice of unionism in New Zealand, and served on several international union forums, including a spell as a member of the body controlling the International Labour Organization.

Skinner retired in 1979 and was replaced by the more militant Jim Knox. Knox's style led to a sidelining of Skinner, though he retained an involvement with the Shipping Corporation of New Zealand until the 1980s. After his wife died in 1985, Skinner spent his time largely out of the public spotlight. He died on 11 November 1991 in Auckland.

Skinner's autobiography, Man to Man (co-written by John Berry), was published by Whitcoulls in 1980.