I attended the HTUP in Fall 1981, staying at Morris Hall on the HBS campus; this was the last 13-week course on the HBS campus. For various reasons, chiefly commercial, the HBS was no longer interested in having unionists among them, especially when higher-paying MBA students could be their replacements.
The main reason I attended is because the then Secretary of the Labor Council, Barrie Unsworth (HTUP '66) asked if I could take the place of Judith Walker (1938-2001) who had been blocked from going by her national secretary of the then Australian Insurance Employees Association, as he believed the HTUP was CIA-backed. Thank heavens for that paranoia. So, aged 26, I made my first overseas flight. The lecturers were mostly liberal Democrats, with some Rockefeller Republicans, like Professor John Dunlop (1914-2003), the former United States Secretary of Labor, from whom I better appreciated the Harvard Socratic method of discussion. In my day, we inter-mingled with MBA students in several classes. I was then not as familiar with business & economics as I later became. Lectures, reading, discussions, mingling were invaluable to learning. Joe O'Donnell was HTUP executive director, 1955-1983. He was Boston Irish labor old school. In looks and Irish-American sentimentality, he reminded me of Spencer Tracey in the movie 'The Last Hurrah'. He was an inspiring, practical, and good man. My research paper was on collective bargaining versus conciliation and arbitration -- themes that would become prominent in Australian debates on the regulation of the Australian labor market in the 1980s and 1990s. At our graduation, Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor in the Watergate case, spoke about being true to doing the right thing.
Harvard taught me good lessons, but I was shocked, even in liberal Massachusetts how anti-union were most businesses and management. In Australia, I considered serving in the union movement was like a vocation, something good (and doing good) and respectable. It stunned me that in much American discourse there was an assumed link between corruption and unionism, an outrageous, regular, and wicked slur, no matter what failures there were over the years.
I left America in late 1981, thinking that surely this could never happen back home. It never got as bad as America, but particularly in the 1980s and 1990s the 'legitimacy' of unionism -- aligned with a libertarian deregulation mindset -- became a big theme of conservatives in Australia and therefore something to battle along with my friends and colleagues in Australia.
What impact has the HTUP had on your life/career? The Program forced me to try to become better qualified for many challenges ahead. When I attended in 1981, I was relatively junior, as Research and Education Officer. Later, from 1984, I was elected Assistant Secretary then, from 1989 to 1994, Secretary of the Labor Council of NSW. I liaised with the AFL-CIO and some union leaders I met about some of the challenges, but mostly unions in NSW were on our own, trying to fight hardline anti-union legislation. The Hawke and Keating Labor governments (1983-1996) resisted but conservative state governments, in NSW in particular from 1988-1995, required finesse in resisting. Conservative governments emasculated the NSW system of industrial relations, a factor that led most unions to seek national award coverage -- a topic too complicated to discuss here.
My history in the Australian union movement is summarised here: https://michaeleasson.com/profiles/2008-the-secretaryship-of-michael-eas...
Over the years, I was a member of the Transport Workers Union, the Federated Clerks Union, and the Australian Journalist Union. The last two names no longer exist, post various amalgamations. I am still a unionist as a member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance. From 2015 to February 2022, I was independent Chair of the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia.
What I do now is mainly in property funds management and related technology investment with union aligned pension funds. See: www.eg.com.au
Do you have an interesting/funny story of when you attended the program? I still remember my first day on campus and ordering a hamburger and almost spitting it out. There were pickles instead of beetroot! I had never found pickles on an Australian hamburger, (McDonalds had not yet come to Australia.) I still remove pickles whenever I order.
Alas, I might have drunk one or two beers too many from time to time. Once, someone more genteel to what I was used to, asked me about those cute-looking koala bears. I responded: "Don't get too close. They could rip your f***ing guts out." I had in mind koalas' sharp claws.... Read more about Michael Easson
