Henry with his trademark braces
A union man through and through Elizabeth Brown | Senior Communications Advisor
When Senior Industrial Officer Henry Stubbs retires this month, not only will it end his 28 years at ASMS, it will also bookend a near lifetime career of unionism. Henry started with ASMS in 1994, just a few years after it was founded, becoming its first ever industrial officer. In the years since, he has supported hundreds of ASMS members and been integral to the growth of the union, not to mention a wise and generous colleague to ASMS staff through the years. Henry came to ASMS with strong union credentials. As a young man he abandoned a law degree to become a full-time Wellington bus driver. Against the grain of his conservative National Party family, he joined the Tramways Union, moving up the ranks to become President of the Wellington branch and then its National Secretary. With an office in Wellington’s Trades Hall, Henry was lucky to escape the 1984 bombing that killed cleaner Ernie Abbott. “The bomb was in an old-styled school case and sat outside my office all day on the ground floor until five o’clock, when unfortunately, Ernie picked it up. I had been in a meeting down the hall with several others and we had left the building about 15 minutes before the blast.” In the late 1980s Henry went back to university to finish his law degree. Keen to support the fight-back against the introduction of the union-busting Employment Contracts Act (ECA), he joined the insurance and bank workers’ union FINSEC as its Central Regional Secretary.
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THE SPECIALIST | JUNE 2022
An ideal fit In 1994 an ad for a foundation industrial officer at ASMS caught his eye. Armed with a reference from Council of Trade Unions President Ken Douglas, Henry saw it as an ideal fit. “They wanted someone who was legally qualified, which I was; they wanted someone with union experience, which I had a great deal of; and as a bonus my father and both grandfathers were doctors, so I was familiar with the medical community and the system.” At the time ASMS had 1,400 members. Led by Executive Director Ian Powell, Henry says the focus was to build union membership and finances and show that ASMS was “here to stay”. At the time, many unions were being destroyed and the unionised workforce fell from 80% to well below 50%. “The health sector was completely shaken up by the so-called health reforms which had grown out of the neo-liberal economic and political order that had spawned the ECA. The reforms were predicated on the belief that if you turned health into a competitive market, it would be cheaper,” says Henry. Despite the political climate, collective agreements were negotiated for ASMS members in most of the 23 market-
