Speaker & Worship Leader:- Rachel Mackintosh

Violence and harassment in the world of work affects us all.
What is the spiritual moment we need to address it?

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Rachel Mackintosh © 4 May 2025

I begin this talk by reciting a speech I gave at the International Labour Organisation’s 2019 Conference in Geneva, when I was the Worker Representative for New Zealand and when a new international labour convention was passed, creating a new human right – the right to be free from violence and harassment in the world of work:

In this convention, we have a vision of a different and better world for all people.

While I am here representing hundreds of thousands of working people in my country, for me, as for most women workers I know, this convention and these recommendations are personal. #MeToo — and now these instruments — have brought women workers, from Hollywood to Hamilton, to see our common issues.

I understand from my own experience the silencing, diminishing and spirit-crushing effect of discrimination and harassment. This convention, with its recognition of violence and harassment as a range of behaviours, tells me that what I have experienced counts: that it is one end of a range.

I have not been murdered at work but my sisters whose violent partners track them down and kill them have. I have not been beaten at work but a member of my union – a security guard at Waikato hospital – was, just a few weeks ago.

Based on an understanding that some of us are more vulnerable than others, and that our stories are common but different, these instruments truly leave no one behind.

We have brought our heads and our hearts to this tripartite negotiation and we have the found words to give a framework to our vision. The next steps are actions. Let’s do this.

My final words then were, “Let’s do this.”

I borrowed them from Jacinda Ardern, a person who can no longer live in Aotearoa because of being spat at in the street, and threatened with violence and murder.

So, a bit more about the convention in question: it is ILO Convention 190 on violence and harassment.

Convention 190 creates a new human right, for all workers. To have a world of work free from violence and harassment.

Convention 190 is comprehensive, recognising the breadth of the world of work — for Jacinda the world of work was the whole country, perhaps the whole world. For the rest of us, the world of work spills beyond the factory or office walls, as we are whole people, connected on commutes and online and in our social worlds to our work.

“What do you do?” is the western question at parties. The answer is not, “I cut onion very finely when making a risotto,” though I may do. The answer is what I do for a living.

Convention 190 is comprehensive, recognising that some are more vulnerable than others to violence and harassment, because of their gender, their immigration status, their employment status, their ethnicity, their gender identity or sexual orientation, their age.

Convention 190 is comprehensive, recognising that violence and harassment are a range of behaviours and practices, that violence and harassment can be individual or collective, behavioural or structural. It can be a small silencing action of humiliation, it can be a job that causes financial violence by not paying enough, it can be murder.

Convention 190 is comprehensive, recognising that we need to respond to violence and harassment, but also that responding is not enough, we also need to prevent it.

Convention 190 is comprehensive, recognising that the solutions are many: they involve education and leadership, collective bargaining and judicial responses, hope and change. They involve a change in culture. They are more than simply the right of an employer to sack a worker who harasses someone. The solutions involve hope and action to build a world where all people have access to the right to be free. Where there are no more perpetrators, so we can walk safely in the streets at any time of day. Where we can go to work without fear. Where we can come home alive. Alive and thriving.

Having and international convention may be necessary for this vision, but it is not sufficient.

We need action. As I said in 2019, and as Jacinda said, “let’s do this.”

We need action. But what action?

Glib action will not work.

I could talk here about ratifying Convention 190, which Australia has done and New Zealand has not. I believe that to be important.

I could talk here about strengthening collective bargaining, about creating strong trade unions who are able to build a world of love in which they aren’t constantly fighting for survival. I believe that to be important.

I could talk here about creating a gender-responsive judicial system at all levels, from workplace processes to the Supreme Court, so that women and gender minorities are not re-traumatised by the experience of seeking justice. I believe that to be important.

I could talk here about raising sufficient taxes to have resources to create programmes to eradicate violence and harassment. I believe that to be important.

I choose to talk here, today, about poetry.

Here is a poem:

Thinking about forgiveness

By Dinah Hawken

The v in give

is a valley

you can walk down.

You might see

the old shack

where the fucker still lives.

Forgive me

writing

about forgiveness.

It can be a bowl

of lukewarm, stagnant water.

The mountains rising

on either side

are cold and hard

and block out the sun.

A thousand times in my mind

I have stood outside

this rotting door.

Forgiveness is loved by the ones

who pray in pure snow.

This man raped a child.

His sin is unforgivable.

Tell your big God

that I have been here

a thousand times

intending to tear a human being

to pieces.

But this time I am talentless

and frail and don’t know

if I can forgive my own sterility.

The shack is quiet. Overhung

by heartless trees.

To forgive is the least

sentimental act

in any language.

How forgiveable

will his face

turn out to be?

A tui comes

like kindness,

sings joy

and suddenly leaves.

See how birds,

mountains and trees,

unblaming and blameless, are free.

Why on earth

am I down here when I could be flying

over this dark valley in a small plane

in full sunlight, oblivious?

Oblivion.

It might be the only sin.

I am too hard to forgive.

Could something bold

in the neutral, natural world,

in which I am kin,

help me to open this door,

softly, expecting anything?

https://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/hawken/thinking.asp

I choose to talk about poetry so that we, together, may find an inner place to experience what is necessary to act.

In poetry, every word resonates with all the times we have heard the word before. So we all may hear a poem differently. What can we hear here together?

In this poem we find an unforgivable sin. The rape of a child. This will resonate differently for each of us. It resonates with the echoes of pain and violence that we may have known. It speaks of that range of behaviours and practices that Convention 190 addresses.

In this poem we find an image: the v in give is a valley you can walk down. It resonates with the valleys we have known.

The “give” foreshadows the forgiveness of the rest of the poem.

And then we may be shocked by learning that, in this valley, the fucker still lives.

And so we encounter the problem of forgiveness. It can be a bowl of lukewarm, stagnant water.

How can we reconcile the beauty and the violence? How can forgiveness come? Does it need to?

Our valley is suddenly a place of hardness, its walls blocking out the sun. We meet vengeance, intending to tear a human being to pieces.

Where is this going? Are we getting coiled up in some internal knot? How can there be beauty in the world? How can we find peace?

The poem gives us a possible way through.

First it shows us a human response to a terrible and violent act: an act of the violent abuse of the power of an adult over a child.

That act is unforgivable. The rapist doesn’t deserve forgiveness.

Then the poem lifts us above our human, judgmental state.

“Could something bold in the neutral, natural world in which I am kin, help me to open this door …?”

In this world, in our culture, there is much judgment and we talk a lot about deserving. You may notice that I have not said that people deserve to be free from violence and harassment.

Deserving is a problem of our time, that warps our internal knots, and warps our sense of what is to be done. Our sense of what action we can take.

The notion of deserving gets in the way of forgiveness. It gets in the way of equity. To speak of what people deserve separates people from each other. Deserving makes sense only in opposition to undeserving.

If I deserve the right to be free from violence and harassment, please tell me who doesn’t? Who are the undeserving? Are the innocent deserving and the guilty undeserving? Where does this lead us?

The rapist is undeserving. There is no moving on from that. It is a dead end.

Unless we come from another angle. In the neutral, natural world, in which we are kin.

Human rights are not concerned with deserving. Human rights are inherent. They inhere in us for the simple fact of our being human. They make the world better without moral judgment.

There is no sorting hat.

If we can sit with our feelings of vengeance and hatred, if we can observe the cold, hard mountains blocking out the sun …

And then, if we can find kinship with the Tui who comes, like kindness … then we find our moment, then we can start to make things better.

Then we may choose our action. Will we work for ratification of Convention 190? Will we support stronger trade unions? Will we campaign for better judicial systems? Will we work towards a social contract with more taxes to build a kinder world?

When the Tui comes, like kindness, what will you do?

Amen

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