to Eric Halstead. He stood for the seat again at the next election but was again unsuccessful. Skinner had initially hoped to win nomination for the safe seat of but was instead allocated the more marginal seat of Tamaki and was resentful towards Ritchie Macdonald who won the nomination for the Ponsonby seat. Skinner returned to his union career, becoming one of the new leaders of the movement after the disastrous 1951 Waterfront dispute. In 1952 he was elected vice president of the Auckland Trades Council and became president two years later, a position he retained for over 20 years. In 1959 Skinner was elected vice president of the New Zealand Federation of Labour and became president on the death of Fintan Patrick Walsh in 1963. As a leader, he was more conciliatory than his firebrand predecessor and encouraged several disaffected unions to rejoin the national body. Skinner's conciliatory style served him well during the following years, as the late 1960s saw a rise in union restlessness with a government-controlled wage-fixing system. While he lost the vote on some key union policies, his strategy of directly approaching employers and individual unions to get them to work towards compromise solutions was frequently far more effective than his opponents' calls for the widespread use of direct action. By the late 1960s, collective bargaining was a well-established part of industrial relations. Skinner's 16-year leadership of the FoL was marked by his attempts to find consensus and avoid division wherever possible — traits possibly born out of the aftermath of the 1951 dispute. By the 1970s, Skinner was seen as the voice of unionism in New Zealand, and served on several international union forums, including a spell as a member of the body controlling the International Labour Organization. With the election of Norman Kirk's Labour government in 1972, Skinner was able to have more say, indirectly, on policy. He was instrumental in founding the Shipping Corporation of New Zealand, and was its deputy chairman. A new Industrial Relations Act passed by the government was negotiated with the FOL and the Employers' Federation. The 1975 general election saw a return to power of Robert Muldoon and the National Party, which was elected on a strong anti-union platform. The introduction of a wage freeze in 1976 and amendments to the Industrial Relations Act which changed the definition of strikes and lockouts and increased penalties against striking