Meet Allan Halse

Bullying altered the direction of Halse’s career when, as a union rep in government service, he began to assist bullied workers. After leaving public service, he founded CultureSafe NZ.

Since 2014, CultureSafe NZ, like the Workplace Bullying Institute, in the U.S., has educated the public about the scourge of workplace bullying and lobbied lawmakers for change. Allan Halse is its founder. It was never a big or rich organization. An incredibly motivated staff of 3-4 professionals used their technical and sleuthing skills to help aggrieved workers mistreated by their NZ employers.

In a very significant way, CultureSafe NZ has gone beyond how the WBI supports bullied individuals. In NZ when targets want to seek relief and/or compensation from their abusive employers, bullied targets can call on Allan Halse to represent them in cases heard by the Employment Relations Authority (ERA), the government’s “dispute resolution” agency. He also represents them in mediation, before the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment’s Mediation Service (MBIE), and in Employment Court (EC) when ERA determinations are deemed unsatisfactory to clients. Allan has represented over a thousands bullied workers with a 70% success rate.

The nature of the work with bullied clients has also made Allan an expert on the documentable health harm caused by bullying. Not only do his clients experience unremitting anxiety and clinical depression, many suffer trauma and a considerable proportion contemplate (and complete) suicide.

Allan’s ability to represent bullied workers, the only New Zealander to do so, is granted by the founding ERA Act that permits workers to be represented by anyone of their choosing, including non-lawyers.

Allan’s haters. Corporate lawyers who lose to Allan hate the ERA Act that opens the door to non-lawyer representatives. Allan is NOT a lawyer, but he always faces lawyers in cases before the government. Bullying employers employ lawyers. Bullying managers never represent themselves before the ERA. Therefore, lawyers hate Allan. A few employers who lost their cases or are compelled to take corrective actions based on Allan’s coupling of ERA/MBIE/EC representation and public pressure through social media also hate him.

Allan Halse

The aspect of bullying that drives Allan’s work is the risk of suicide by bullied workers and the host of stress-related diseases triggered by bullying that can kill. He (like us at WBI) find it unfathomable that employers, anti-labor lawyers and government agencies ignore the documentable risks and choose to fault the stridency/tone of our calls to end bullying to save lives upsetting, rather than being upset over the dereliction of employers’ duty to care for the safety of their workers. It is a deliberate disinformation campaign to distract from employer malfeasance to blame injured workers for their fate. The ultimate disrespect shown to bullied workers is to attack the nation’s lone anti-bullying champion.

The Organization Halse Founded

CultureSafe NZ Ltd. was always a small, underfunded entity. Staff hovered at 3 to 4 professionals who worked long days, weekends and holidays to research and mount winning cases heard before the ERA at which Allan Halse would represent the bullied workers. They abhorred workplace bullying and saw the harm it wreaked on people’s lives firsthand. They survived on sustenance wages. Most months, Allan did not pay himself. CultureSafe had a low fee structure. In many cases, no fees were due until the case was won and an award granted. Even then, some clients failed to pay the organization that had helped them. Every one working there did so out of a personal commitment to right wrongs in New Zealand workplaces. They were passionate advocates, driven by compassion.

Opponents characterized them, and Halse, as fraudulent fee gougers who exploited unwitting clients. Yet no one got rich, let alone were compensated in a manner to enjoy an upper middle class life. The fiscal case against Halse and CultureSafe was based on lies.