Building on Unstable Foundations

For many Australian trade unionists — including both elected leaders and some rank-and-file members — it was a smart investment for the union movement to make a significant contribution to the reelection of the Albanese Labor government. This contribution included millions of dollars in monetary donations to the ALP as well as donations in kind. In addition to this, the union movement organized its own third-party campaigning, while many unions also directed staff to volunteer for Labor’s campaign.

These efforts helped to deliver not only a historic victory for Labor, but the first majority Labor government in which Labor’s left faction also enjoys a majority. In short, if the union movement’s investment in Labor is going to pay dividends, now is the time.

Essential to this is a hardheaded analysis of the Labor government’s record on industrial relations (IR). And on the positive side, it’s possible to point to reforms that have led to gains for the union movement. For example, the Labor government’s first-term IR reforms are now locked in. These include measures regulating insecure work, facilitating multi-employer bargaining and strengthening union delegates’ rights.

These IR reforms have coincided with an increase in overall trade union membership and density. According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) release, in the two years from August 2022 to August 2024, union density increased from 12.5 percent of the overall labour force to 13.1 percent. This translates into a total membership increase of nearly two hundred thousand additional union members, spread across both the public and private sector.

But perhaps the most positive news for the movement was the exceptional growth (albeit from a low starting figure) of union membership among young workers. Among workers aged fifteen to twenty-four, the rate of union membership increased by 53 percent, with a further 22 percent increase in union membership among workers aged twenty-five to thirty-four years.

Yet when viewed in light of the overall situation, these good news stories lose their optimistic glow. Indeed, for many unionists, the movement remains mired in a winter of despair. Even the news about membership growth, on closer inspection, reveals particular and structural vulnerabilities. The largest membership density increases occurred in health care and social assistance and construction, which recorded 2.8 and 2 percent respectively. Employment in both sectors is vulnerable to changes in government policy and may fall victim to future austerity drives in response to a deteriorating global economy.

And at any rate, the reported 0.6 percent increase in union density is structurally modest and needs to be understood in the context of a historical decline. Once, the Australian union movement was comparable to that of a Nordic country. Now, it’s more like that of Maine or Illinois.

Criminalizing Militancy

Indeed, the ABS union membership growth figures may omit a more important part of the picture. The ABS reporting period concluded in September 2024, when the federal Labor government passed legislation to place the onstruction Division of the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) into a five-year administration. According to subsequent reports, some branches lost nearly 20 percent of their membership as a result.

In response, sacked CFMEU officials challenged Labor’s legislation in the High Court. On June 18 this year, however, the High Court handed down a unanimous decision upholding the government’s legislation.

The ruling made it clear that the decision to pursue a legal strategy amounted to a waste of time, energy and resources — resources that could have been channeled into a rank and file–led movement for organic union renewal. Worse, the High Court’s decision has created a precedent that future federal governments will be able to wield against other unions.

Moreover, the ongoing turmoil in the construction sector does not bode well for a turnaround in the overall the rate of industrial action, which remains historically anemic.

According to the ABS June release of data on industrial disputes, the March 2025 quarter had the lowest rates of industrial action for nearly two years, with only 13,900 total working days lost to industrial action.

Notwithstanding that quarterly figures can be volatile, these figures represent a continuing trend. The last two years saw 136,200 and 108,300 days lost to industrial action respectively, in line with the last decade’s average of 110,520.

In this light, the latest results do not presage a return to industrial militancy. And they’re positively disastrous when viewed in light of figures from the 1970s and 1980s, which saw, respectively, over three million and two million days lost to industrial action annually.

Simply put, there has been a generational decline in union membership and industrial action. And this historic trend both created and is maintained by a generation of union leaders who lack confidence in the collective capacity of members to win transformative gains.

This lack of confidence helps explain why ousted CFMEU leaders prioritized a High Court challenge. It also helps explain why the union movement’s leadership as a whole has continued to prioritize parliamentary election campaigning, both by donating money to Labor and by instructing officials to campaign.

Although these strategies are manifestly yet to resolve the ongoing crisis of organized labor, union leaders remain committed to them — and it’s partly because they suit a movement that’s poor in shop-floor power but rich in assets.

Based on public financial data, at a conservative estimate, the Australian trade union movement holds net assets worth over AU$ 2.5 billion. When membership and confidence are low, why risk industrial action when you can spend a few million on electing MPs instead?

A House Divided

One further source of despair is Albanese’s decision to shift Murray Watt from the workplace relations portfolio to environment and water. There are concerns within the movement that this may signal a relative deprioritization of further workplace relations on the part of the federal government.

This is no small matter. Some aspects of Australian labor law — including the right to strike and freedom of association — are more consistent with authoritarian regimes than the norm in liberal democracies. For instance, workers don’t have the ability to boost union density by limiting benefits won through union representation to union members. Indeed, Australian workers don’t even have the right to take industrial action to enforce conditions enshrined in enterprise agreements or to oppose job losses.

Australia’s IR regime is, in many important regards, to the right of that established by the conservative UK governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. And the consequences of this anti-worker, anti-union status quo have been profound, jeopardizing the most entrenched institutional structures of the movement. For the first time in generations, at the national leadership level, the Australian union movement is a house divided.

In early September last year, in response to the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ (ACTU) position on the CFMEU administration, the Communications, Electrical, Energy and Plumbing Union (CEPU) — one of Australia’s largest blue-collar unions — disaffiliated from the national peak body.

Since then, the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), which forms the largest part of the CEPU, has gone on to organize a breakaway forum known as Trade Unions for Democracy. The new forum subsequently hosted two national meetings in December and March, with representatives from various unions (or individual branches of such unions), including the plumbers’ union, the meatworkers’ union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), and the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU). However, following the former CFMEU leadership’s failed High Court challenge, the future of Trade Unions for Democracy remains, at least externally, unclear.

Leadership Vacuum

There are also deeper-running political and historical aspects to the crisis of organized labor in Australia.

In some ways, the union movement never recovered from the dissolution of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1991. While the CPA itself was electorally marginal, it counted among its members a number of militant, left-wing trade union leaders like Jack Mundey (Builders Labourers’ Federation), Tom Wright (a leader within the Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union) and Big Jim Healy (the Waterside Workers’ Federation).

The CPA won an outsized influence in the union movement in part because it provided — despite its faults — a nonparliamentary forum for developing higher trade union strategy. This function has not been adequately replaced since.

In the absence of such an alternative, the Australian trade union movement increasingly turned to the United States for inspiration — and concurrently, Australia’s union density figures came to reflect those of the United States.

Without a political-economic philosophy that gazes beyond the horizon of capitalism, unions —their leaders especially — have come to accept the basic legitimacy of a legal, economic, and political status quo that is profoundly hostile to organized labor. As long as this remains the case, the movement cannot return to viability.

By contrast, the starting point for good union strategy is to reject the idea that capitalism is natural or inescapable, but rather, to see it as a historically created — and therefore temporary — system of ownership and social relations.

Seen in this light, the legal, political, and economic realities of our era lose their aura of legitimacy and invincibility. This, in turn, makes it possible to conceive of a horizon beyond capitalism, one that can liberate strategic thinking with respect to the present. In short, a socialist vision can liberate the movement from the tyranny of the present, allowing it to begin mapping and debating paths forward.

Beyond this, regardless of how organized labor responds to the crisis it faces, the neoliberal capitalist model is obviously dissolving of its own accord, albeit unevenly and in unpredictable ways. And this will inevitably impact the union movement — because, after all, Australian unions developed their present organizational and strategic models in response to the neoliberal reforms dating back to the 1980s.

On a broad level, these reforms restricted militancy and industrial action, pushing unions to shift their focus away from rank-and-file organization, and towards more managerial, top-down campaigning models. Dissident unions were deregistered or forced to merge with more compliant ones. Other unions merged in order to pool resources and survive the decline.

As a consequence, since the 1980s, Australian unions have increasingly employed more staff relative to the size of overall union membership, a trend that was both produced by and that reinforces a shift towards managerial, top-down strategies. Previously, unions had placed greater emphasis on delegates elected by rank-and-file members at shop-floor branch meetings. However, as union membership declined, they compensated by employing an increasing array of specialists, including industrial officers, organizers, case handlers, and so on. It was a defensive stance that, paradoxically, further weakened unions’ ability to defend themselves.

It is not that it’s a bad thing in and of itself if unions increase the number of people they directly employ. There is nothing wrong in principle with unions employing people, and stronger unions would naturally hire additional organizers and officials, in line with membership increases.

Rather, the problem is when unions boost staffing numbers to compensate for declining membership, rank and file organization, and a declining working-class culture of solidarity. This reality is why, to many union leaders, the idea of powerful, member-led industrial action seems utopian and dangerous. By contrast, it’s easy and safe to direct a small army of organizers.

Hopeful Developments

There is, however, meaningful cause for hope. A new generation of unionists is emerging. They have taken stock of a social and political system stacked against them and are not passively waiting for their existing leaders to just fix things for them. Instead, they are organizing together to reform the movement.

For example, a rank-and-file grouping of Victorian state public sector workers, under the banner of A Voice for Members, recently mounted a challenge against the incumbent administration of the Victorian branch of their Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU). Led by longtime radical unionist and public sector lawyer Jiselle Hanna, the reform ticket won in a landslide, taking a clean sweep of executive positions.

This victory against a union administration that in the eyes of its members had grown too comfortable with their major employer, the Victorian Labor government, gives radical unionists across the country reason to hope that they too can challenge established office holders. And their impressive margin of victory gives the Voice for Members team space to prove that radical member democracy can deliver material gains for workers.

Moreover, it cannot be dismissed as an exception — just weeks after the upset in Victoria, an insurgent rank and file campaign claimed victory in the Public Service Association of South Australia. The Australian union movement may be in the beginning of a wave of regime change.

And although the rate of industrial action remains anemic, this may conceal a further, more important reason for hope. In June and July this year, Grill’d workers across sixteen stores took part in Australia’s second wave of fast food workers strikes. This came on the back of strikes at the Better Read Than Dead bookstore in 2021, the Apple Store in 2022, and among aquarium and attraction workers who struck for the first time in 2023. In 2024, Woolworths employees across multiple warehouses took strike action against algorithmic management.

What makes these examples important is that they were led by an emerging layer of young unionists whose militancy is a product of the same status quo behind the crisis of organized labor. And their efforts show that where there’s an opportunity, workers will participate in strikes enthusiastically. Therein lies the hope for the future of the movement.