Greenpeace row leads to payout to campaigner

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Feuding in Greenpeace New Zealand's Auckland office led to a payout of more than $37,000 to a sacked senior campaigner.

The Employment Tribunal awarded $34,939 in lost income and compensation and $2347 in expenses to graduate chemist Carl Reller after finding that Greenpeace failed to justify his dismissal two years ago as its genetic engineering and toxics campaigner.

But this was 40 per cent less than adjudicator Rick Mirkin said he would have awarded had Mr Reller not escalated a "dysfunctional" relationship with former campaign manager Tricia Allen, a recent import from Greenpeace in Britain.

Greenpeace has paid the money after deciding not to appeal against the decision, which followed a hearing in which former executive director Di Paton described a campaign department that was "in turmoil" in 1999.

That was when Mr Reller was hired by Ms Paton, taking a 50 per cent drop in income from a senior environmental management position with the Wellington City Council to fulfil what Mr Mirkin said was an altruistic ambition.

Mr Reller, who had a long and impressive career both in his native United States and New Zealand, said he received assurances that Greenpeace would act ethically before he decided to leave the corporate world.

But Mr Mirkin said scant attention was paid to Mr Reller's induction and he had little, if any, opportunity for some months to meet other members of the campaign team or even Ms Allen, who has since left Greenpeace.

Mr Reller said that when they eventually met, his boss humiliated him in front of colleagues and treated him like "a badly behaved animal".

Mr Mirkin said it was unfair to blame Mr Reller for the failure of a campaign that a Greenpeace Australia audit found extremely unrealistic in its conception and poorly structured, directed and supported by Ms Allen and the New Zealand organisation.

Ms Allen did not testify to the tribunal, mainly because Greenpeace was unwilling to pay her to travel from the South Island.

Ms Paton prepared a memo accusing Ms Allen of an almost complete absence of simple courtesies, making rude and offensive comments, walking out of meetings and slamming doors - but did not send it as she was stepping down as executive director.

Another former Greenpeace worker, Jane O'Connell, testified to being among several who quit because of Ms Allen's behaviour.

On the other hand, Mr Mirkin said Mr Reller seldom seemed prepared to acknowledge that he could have been at fault in any way and escalated the dispute with tactics such as emailing colleagues with a poem implicitly likening Ms Allen to Nazi Holocaust murderers.

Matters came to a head when Ms Allen told Ms Paton's successor, Margaret Crozier, that she would leave the office until action was taken against Mr Reller.

Mr Mirkin said the new director was clearly put in a corner, the dysfunctional relationship between Ms Allen and Mr Reller threatening to leave her campaign team leaderless.

"In the end, he was really dismissed because he could not find a formula for getting along with his manager, and Ms Crozier came down on the side of supporting the superior of the two."

nzherald.co.nz/environment