Growing up in Narrabri, in north-western NSW, Mick Sheils used an old army coat as a dooner and enjoyed a simple life. He talks to Stephanie Quine about his journey to becoming the NSW Industrial Relations Commissioner and his passion for resolving disputes.

The third youngest of 10 children, Mick Sheils had always been around and involved with people.

He recalls his father collecting coupons for rations of tea, petrol and clothing after World War II, and his mother boiling calico to make softer blankets for the family.

Growing up in big family, every cent counted.

“My father was a railway man and was always a member of the union. He’d talk about various conditions of employment … Things were tough, especially after the war,” says Sheils.

If you’d told Sheils then that he would one day be the NSW Commissioner of Industrial Relations (IR), he would have laughed. “If you’d said I would open the batting for Australia or play in the Davis Cup, I might have believed that,” laughs Sheils, who played tennis up until 10 years ago.

The Sheils family at Narrabri in 1949

A story, a spark
In 1949, during his first year at a Catholic high school, Sheils got his first taste of an IR dispute.

His English teacher, Sister Mary Fidelas, had a brother who was a coal miner and told her class about the bitter coal miner’s dispute and strike action that lasted over two months in 1949.

“She told us about all the horrible things the coal miners had to do and how they had to leave the mine, not having a shower or not be able to take their lunch working underground. That got me thinking about peoples’ rights, particularly at work,” says Sheils.

A few years later, he scored a local job working for a plumber who, he says, was not a particularly reliable boss.

“Sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn’t, and that fuelled my enthusiasm for IR too, because I knew I was entitled to certain things,” says Sheils.

The big city
Soon after, Sheils found himself at Sydney Central Railway in the Railways Institute Hall, surrounded by a couple of hundred people he didn’t know, sitting an exam.

Coming to Sydney was a “fairly traumatic event” for a young country boy, as Sheils recalls, but his father wanted one of his five sons to be a tradesman.

“The others pursued clerical oriented careers,” explains Sheils, “so that was me.”

Passing the exam, Sheils began work as an apprentice fitter and machinist at Narrabri west locomotive depot and completed his ‘tech’ by correspondence before transferring to Sydney in 1954.

He stopped work on the railways in 1959 and went to work at Sydney City Council (SCC) as a tradesman for 10 years before transferring into SCC’s IR and Personnel Department.

“They must have thought I had some sort of talent,” he says.

The middleman
That talent for IR flourished in 1979 when he left the SCC to work as an IR officer in the general division of the public service board of NSW; then the employer of all public servants in NSW.

Here, he was responsible for a range of industries, including agriculture and policing,
and got to appear in various industrial tribunals, state and federal, “pretty much every day”.

He remembers one case during this time when he felt a “great deal of sympathy” for workers.

“Police had to be on call in case there was a homicide or something like that, but they weren’t getting any special allowance, so the police association made a claim,” explains Sheils. “We put a submission to the Premiers Department saying that the claim had merit, but … eventually they knocked it back.”

The claim ended up in front of the Industrial Commission, which finally granted police an on call allowance.

Sheils himself did not go before the Commission on that case, but after he became a NSW IR Commissioner in 1986, he again had the opportunity to help the police with a dispute.

“[During] my time as commissioner, parties would frequently ask me to work out their dispute by arbitration,”says Sheils. “When serious disputes would come up, the president of the commission would allocate the matter to me.”

This was also the case when NSW was bidding to host the 2000 Olympics.

“The minister at the time was proposing that the traffic control centre, which controls all the traffic lights and cameras, become completely civilianised,” recalls Sheils.

“Of course, the Police Association didn’t think very highly of that, so I had this high level conference at police HQ where there was a lot of serious negotiations about it. I was shown video of a donor heart being transported from Westmead to St Vincent’s Hospital and how the traffic centre [effectively] coordinated the lights all the way from Parramatta into the city.”

Like a lot of things in IR, a compromise was reached and traffic control centres were partially civilianised.

Years later, Sheils was told that the the former president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was most impressed by the security and operation of Sydney’s traffic control centre when he came to Australia to oversee the NSW bid and that it might have helped Sydney to be the host city.

Former NSW Industrial Commissioners, Reg Mawbey (left) together with Les McMahon (middle) and Mick Sheils

Method in the madness
Sheils left the Commission in 1997 to become the general manager of IR at Transfield Pty, a company “built on Italian migrant workers” which he remembers fondly for its family orientated environment and “inspirational” founder, the late Franco Belgiorno- Nettis, AC.

For four years at Transfield, Sheils handled IR for high-profile projects including the Walsh Bay redevelopment, Airport Link and the Northside Storage Tunnel in Sydney, and Melbourne’s CityLink.

During this time he gained the respect of employers and unions for his strong mediation skills and ability to help disputing parties reach an amicable settlement.

Much debate and change occurred in IR after Sheils left Transfield. John Howard’s controversial WorkChoices brought IR to the nation’s attention when it came into effect in March 2006 and was subsequently repealed entirely by Labor under Kevin Rudd after the federal election the following year.

At the time WorkChoices was passed, Sheils had begun working part-time at Carroll & O’Dea (COD) Lawyers as an advisor in Sydney, alongside Peter Punch, head of COD’s workplace solutions group.

In November 2007, the pair co-authored a paper on Labor’s IR policy, entitled Australia: ALP Industrial Relations Policy - ´Junking´ Or Only ´Massaging´ Workchoices?

“The current IR policy is certainly an improvement on WorkChoices,” says Sheils.

“I didn’t think WorkChoices was a very fair system at all, because it disadvantaged people who didn’t have any bargaining power, particularly with AWAs.

“I think there’s a need to get back to the old system whereby an industrial tribunal would intervene in a serious dispute. It’s very limited in what the Fair Work Act can do. I think the Act tells you more things that they can’t do than what they can do.”

Sheils is a strong believer in conference over confrontation, and in agreements that are “freely
reached” by both parties, rather than arbitrated.

The Qantas dispute late last year, which saw the grounding of the major airline, would never have gone that far “in the old days”, he says. “There would have been intervention earlier on.”

But the emphasis is on “agreement making” under the Fair Work Act and the current level of disputation is “quite low” compared to when he was in the Commission, he admits.

A people person
An accredited mediator and respected conciliator, today Sheils advises clients on IR disputes, mostly in the not-for-profit sector, and still finds his work rewarding.

His casual approach to mediation sees him call up parties to a dispute on the telephone to introduce himself before a meeting, and he always offers a cup of tea or coffee when they come in.

“I want them to be relaxed and understand that I’m impartial, and I’d like to see them shake hands at the end of it,” he says.

Sheils has been very successful in ensuring this. Only once does he recall having a case where parties wouldn’t shake hands.

In February this year, he was proud - and surprised - to receive an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for his services to IR over the past 45 years.

“My father never thought much of ‘imperial honours’, knighthoods in those days. They were only given to people from the landed gentry, he would say,” recalls Shiels.

Naturally, he is humbled to have been honoured for doing work that he remains “so passionate about”.

That passion is tangible in Sheils’ friendly, consideredcharm and approachable air. It has ensured he is “a bit of a favourite in the office”, say office staff at COD.

Sheils now lives near the water in Sans Souci with his wife and is still very close to his siblings, who are scattered all over the state.

When he’s not working, his “great activity for the last 15 years” has been an honorary position as (unpaid) director of the Hunter Valley Training Company, which employs around 1100 young people as trainees and apprentices throughout NSW.

His advice to young people studying law or interested in a career in IR is not to concentrate so much on winning matters as resolving matters.

“I think the younger generation tend to think that they’ve got to get notches on their belt. IR is all about achieving a lasting result for people,” he says.

Even today, when Sheils is writing anything IR-related, he says he wonders, ‘What would Sister Mary Fidelas think of this?’

Anyone’s guess is that she would be rather proud.