Blue Kennedy — a scrapper who came up the hard way

Press, 17 April 1982, Page 15

Blue Kennedy — a scrapper who came up the hard way

“Blue” Kennedy seems tc have made a smooth transition from the blood and gore of the slaughterhouse to the sun-lit chief executive’s office of the New Zealand Meat Workers’ Union, His hair has . faded from the flaming red that earned him his perverse nickname, and while the broken nose and jug ears mark him as a scrapper, they are contradicted by the well-practised, elegant phrases that roll so fluently off his tongue. Blue Kennedy says that both characteristics — scrapping and learning — date back to his long years on the mutton chain. The meat business is in his blood. His father had a butcher’s shop in south Dunedin, but soon after he was born, in 1924, the family moved to a farm at Taieri to raise pigs and other stock for the business. He grew up on the farm with his brother and five sisters, who gave him the early training in female psychology which he says enabled him to court his wife — “She was in the net before she woke up.” A job on the Railways had a bad beginning. A railwayman who started the same day as Blue Kennedy fell beneath a train. “When I came in next morning they told me they’d scraped him up in a bucket,” he recalls. “That shook me. I had one or two close scrapes myself.” Looking for a safer occupation, he and a friend went up to north Auckland, felling puriri trees, splitting out posts, and putting up fences. Towards the end of the war, the Army called for him. But Blue Kennedy ■proved to have a temperament that matched his hair - “wild and reckless” — and he rebelled against Army discipline more than once. On one leave he went A.W.O.L. for nine days, but , when he got back, expecting the worst, he found he .had been put on final leave in his absence. During that leave the war ended, and he went back to Otago, first truck driving and then into the freezing works. He says he was ignorant of ■unions when he started at the Burnside works as a trainee mutton slaughterman in 1947. “It was some time before the penny dropped,” he says. “No-one came and told me about it.”

But Blue Kennedy always had a very strong sense of injustice, and soon found himself standing up to speak at union meetings. He might have risen to the top earlier if he had not fallen ill with pulmonary tuberculosis after only two seasons at the

i works. He spent the next three years of his life in i hospital, culminating in major surgery to collapse the top lobe of his left lung. It was drastic, leaving him with a. huge scar right around his back, but it worked and he was out of hospital three months later. Easing back into working life with a subsidised job in a shop, he found it hard going on £7 a week, especially as he was getting married, so he decided to return to the freezing works. Back on the chain, he relearned the soul-destroying monotony of the job. Surprisingly; the man he quotes on that subject is his chief adversary, Peter Blomfield, executive director of the Freezing Companies Association. He says that Peter Blomfield calls such work the antithesis of the creative urge — "They break down, they don’t build up, in this battlefield of bloody frenetic activity ... On this treadmill people contract, for economic survival, the corrosive social disease of industrial boredom.” Blue Kennedy has obviously quoted this heavensent ammunition plenty of times before. It fits his own experience — carcases going past at eight a minute while he did the same things to them hour after hour, month after month. He says it takes a lot of self-discipline just to keep working, and contributes to many of the stoppages in the freezing industry. “I finally evolved a counter to it. I used to read prolifically. On the chain you’re not automatons or robots, but the degree of : conscious concentration required is minimal once you’ve mastered the job. It left my mind free to roam, and I used it to think through a multitude of issues. I look back wistfully now to that time when my mind had that freedom.”.. Blue Kennedy worked through tough times in the freezing industry, and regards that as a sound trade union education.- He was 1 asked to stand as assistant slaughtermen’s delegate, and progressed through a number of union posts to the job of president-organiser for Otago Southland, and finally national secretary. He was raised a Baptist,

but became a "renegade” in his youth. He later returned to Christianity, and it is now an important factor in his make-up. “I’ve been a. Christian for many years,” he says, “and I’ve proved the reality of it.” He is a practised preacher, accept-

ing invitations from men’s Christian groups all over the country. But he has not joined any particular sect, being opposed to the denominational system. Neither does he belong to any political party: he thinks it would be incompatible with his job. “I’d be bound to follow their political decisions, and if there was any conflict of interest I’d have to be disloyal to one, or else compromise. No man can serve two masters.” He blames the news media for giving freezing workers a public image that “makes them look as though they’ve been run over by a train,” and points to the hundreds of disputes that are satisfactorily resolved and never make news. “The constructive side

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is never played up,” he complains. The other major culprit in his opinion is an education system that teaches nothing at all about trade unionism, and consequently does nothing to erradicate bias and prejudice. The. Government connives at this he believes, because “the easiest thing in the world to exploit is ignorance.” The bitterest thing to him is that some of the chief denigrators of trade unions are also, the chief beneficiaries of the welfare legislation brought about by pressure from trade unions. He keeps handy a grim, pathetic picture of small boys in miners’ hats ready to go down a pit in 1910. "If the trade unions went into liquidation it would revert to that overnight,” he < r’ .

GARRY ARTHUR

asserts, “because the acquisitive impulse is the fulcrum that our system hinges on.” He would like to see us change from an economic system based on greed — “but as soon as you say that, people get out their mental calculators and say you’re a Red, or at least bright pink.”

With a name like his, how could he be a Red? And anyway, Blue Kennedy sees no chance of changing human nature — “apart from the transforming power of the real genuine Christian ethic.”

“We are born with an acquisitive nature,” he says. “If we admit our perfidious indifference to others and our crass and wholly indefensible selfishness, what steps can we take to correct that? It would require a degree of self-sacrifice and self-discip-

line that most people are not prepared to pay.” New Zealand is now going into an industrial nosedive because of the advent of new technology, in Blue Kennedy’s opinion, and people are going to have to stop their “daily obeisance to the deity of profit," and to start seeing past profit to people. His union’s policy is not to fight the introduction of technology, but to facilitate it — but only on the grounds that there will be no displacement or reduction in the existing number of jobs. Employers will have to diversify into other areas and retrain workers for such work as processing meat that at present is exported as carcases. "There may not be the same level of profitability,” says Blue Kennedy, “but they’ve got to get their priorities right.” He does not take an optimistic view of the future. With rising unemployment, and more jobs being swallowed up by the new technology, he foresees serious strife and violence in New Zealand unless those he calls the socially advantaged start putting people and jobs before profits. He predicts a fight for the equitable distribution of the benefits of technology in society. “I’m not in the game of leaving it in the hands of the socially advantaged,” he says. “I’m aware that we’ve got the Red Squad and the Blue Squad, the police, the judiciary, and the Army to preserve the status quo for the socially advantaged, but they would just drive it (resistance) underground like Northern Ireland.” On the other hand, if those in control do see the writing on the wall and act to share the cake, Blue Kennedy forsees exciting prospects for all New Zealanders.