On any given day, the FedEx facility in the Melbourne suburb of Tullamarine is a hub of activity, as trucks roar in and out of huge warehouses amid clouds of diesel smoke. On 28 August, something new cut through the routine noise. Just after 8am, hundreds of workers walked off the job, along with thousands of others around the country, costing FedEx millions. As the workers marched defiantly up the driveway, they were met by Transport Workers Union (TWU) officials there with flags to show support.
The previous week, 91 percent of FedEx workers had voted to strike for two hours, after management offered them a previously rejected agreement without any improvements.
The union is asking for an above-inflation pay rise, job security measures that limit AI usage and an end to direct service contracts. FedEx uses these contracts to employ third party drivers without the rights or protections of employees, and they are paid piece rates rather than wages. According to the union, contractors are under pressure to make deliveries every four minutes, which leads to dangerous road conditions not only for the contractors but also for other motorists. Road transport is already the most dangerous industry in Australia—according to the government’s quarterly heavy vehicle road deaths report, in the year to March 2026, 225 people were killed in incidents involving heavy vehicles.
In response to workers voting for a two-hour strike and walking off, FedEx locked them out for the entire day.
I attended their action to show solidarity as a TWU workplace delegate and socialist. Some of the workers I spoke to had been with the company for decades, while for others, this was their first strike. Consistently, the workers expressed anger towards FedEx management, and a keenness to escalate the fight.
“I left Ceva, around the corner, because of bad management” one worker, who was on strike for the first time, told me, “but the same things come up here all the time. Disrespect for the workers”. A longer-term worker said, “I’ve been with this company for 25 years, from when it was TNT to now. It’s always been the same, but especially now this American company thinks they can bring in their model, as if we’re the same as America over here”. The US company, FedEx, bought Australian trucking company TNT in 2016. FedEx has a long history of anti-union practices and undercutting wages. It made more than $4 billion profit last year.
This strike comes right in the middle of a pivotal year for the TWU’s “Our roads, our skies, our futures” campaign. The day before the FedEx strike, I was at a TWU-run delegates training session where Sam Lynch, lead organiser of the Victorian/Tasmanian branch of the union, explained that a key aim of the campaign is to stop the new operators who are entering the industry in significant numbers from undercutting and driving down workers’ conditions. The union wants to organise workers at these new trucking companies to protect wages and conditions across the industry.
Another is to improve the conditions in unionised companies. To do this, the union is attempting to line up all the major road transport agreements to expire around the same time. Having them all being renegotiated simultaneously opens up the potential for joint, industry-wide industrial action, and a 24-hour strike co-ordinated across five transport companies already called for 10 September. This will be an important opportunity to push for real wage rises and improved conditions for transport workers.
Weakening this campaign at the outset however is that fact that the union has already reached deals with two major companies, Linfox and Team Global Express, which lock in under-inflation wage rises and weaken the coordinated bargaining effort. According to the union, these workers will receive between 10 and 11 percent pay rises over three years, which barely keeps pace with current inflation.
Transport workers deserve better than this. The sort of fighting spirit we’ll need to win real wage rises and improved conditions was evident in front of FedEx that cold Friday morning. “I kinda thought that two hours wasn’t that much when they first announced it,” a young worker expressed to me, “like, why not 24 or 48 hours? We just got locked out anyway”. The driver who had been with the company for a decade and a half asked me to “imagine if all of these warehouses shut down. Nobody could go somewhere else to fill their order. We’d cripple them”. A FedEx truck drove past as he was saying that, and a yell rose up from the crowd: “Fuck off ya scab!”
It was heartening and beautiful to see those FedEx workers standing there, in their hundreds, chanting and yelling with their heads held high. To win against a multinational monolith, we will need more action like it, and demands worth fighting for.
