Australian unions have a long history of defending civil liberties and standing against imperialism. So why, as our government maintains its support for Israel despite the ongoing murder, starvation and dispossession of Palestinians, are our current union leaders lining up with the political and media establishment in their post-Bondi offensive against the Palestine movement and the right to protest?
Speaking to the arch-reactionary Australian in late December, Health Services Union National President Gerard Hayes and Victorian Trades Hall Council Secretary Luke Hilakari slammed pro-Palestine activists, with Hayes describing them as “obscene” and Hilakari saying they should “back off”. Echoing the state and federal Labor governments’ talking points, they attack activists for continuing to take action against genocide and endorse proposed restrictions on the use of slogans like “globalise the intifada”. Hilakari specifically targets socialists—who he describes as the “extreme left”—for the crime of encouraging workers’ to join their unions and fight for Palestine, calling them “horrible, absolutely horrible”.
This shows how far the current Labor-aligned union leaders have departed from the traditions of internationalism and solidarity historically championed by the union movement. During the Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts, when Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1951, Labor-aligned union leaders did not run to the mouthpiece of the rich and powerful to back their attacks on the left. The Labor leader at the time, Herbert Evatt, by no means a radical, fought the proposed ban, describing it as “totalitarian” and “a step towards fascism”. The referendum to ban the CPA was defeated in large part because of the organising efforts of the unions and the Labor left.
More recently, the Victorian Trades Hall Council defended the right to protest against the Napthine Victorian state government’s expansion of police powers in 2014.
Unions have also long played a leading role in protesting against apartheid regimes, including calling a general strike in Queensland to protest the 1971 visit of the Springbok rugby team, representing apartheid South Africa. The secretary of the ACTU at the time, future prime minister and non-radical Bob Hawke, said of action during the tour “take whatever action is necessary as an act of conscience to obstruct the tour”.
So how does the supposedly left-wing Hilakari justify his attacks on the left in the unions today? According to him, standing up for Palestine is not “union business”. He and Hayes argue that the majority of their members demand they avoid “divisive” political issues in order to focus on “bread-and-butter” industrial issues like pay and conditions.
One would think, then, given their refusal to lift a finger for Palestine, that their industrial victories must be piling high. The reality is the opposite. Writing in the Guardian last year, economist Greg Jericho calculated that, on average, workers are 8.9 percent behind where they would be had wages kept up with inflation since 2021. This historic attack on living standards is made possible by union officials routinely selling workers sub-inflationary pay deals. The consequences are significant—according to the Employee Living Cost Index calculated by the ABS, workers are worse off by around $20,000 a year since 2021.
So while Hayes and Hilakari can draw on and encourage the idea that unions shouldn’t worry themselves with international affairs and instead focus on pay rises, they both fail to deliver those pay rises—where they are not a direct impediment to them—and help to further break down an understanding in the union movement that solidarity and battles for social justice outside the workplace are part of building a stronger union movement and greater industrial strength.
And while these “leaders” invoke member disinterest to justify their positioning, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that workers would get behind pro-Palestine action. A YouGov poll last year showed that 69 percent of Australians supported an end to Israel’s attacks on Gaza and 57 percent supported sanctions on the Israeli government—indicating there is a real basis for more serious action. That our union leaders are happy to use their powerful apparatuses to get out the vote for Labor at each election, regardless of members’ attitudes towards the party, but are unwilling to mobilise to challenge the Labor government’s support for a genocide, gives some indication of the problem.
Mobilising to fight, whether for higher wages or against war, and whether it’s popular or not, is not what informs the approach taken by our union leaders today. Much more important is getting Labor into power or keeping them in power, whatever attacks the party might make on workers or democratic rights. More often than not, a seat in parliament is waiting for the union official who does this best.
It has not always been this bad. There is a rich history of Australian unions acting as fighting organisations, prepared to take on the warmongering billionaires who run our society around both industrial and political issues. One of the high points of this history was the late 1960s and 70s. What was different then? The role of the so-called “extreme left” was decisive.
In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War was the issue that, like Palestine today, exposed a generation to the barbarity of capitalism and the bloody hypocrisy of Western governments. A wave of anti-war radicalism revived the left after years of Cold War conservatism; new left groups sprang up, and existing ones like the CPA and its offshoots were pushed to take a more radical stance.
This wave of radicalism and left-wing organising led to the most militant period in the history of our unions, both politically and industrially. Some unions were led by the left, while others were just pushed into more militant action by left groups organising from within the membership. The NSW Builders Labourers Federation imposed bans on work connected to the war effort, while wharfies in the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) refused to load ships supplying the US military. Union action was decisive in shifting mass opinion against the war as the left unions supported draft resisters and the 1970 moratorium marches against the war.
This period was also when Australian workers made some of the most significant industrial gains in our history, including significant pay rises, reductions in working hours and four weeks of annual leave. The combination of political and industrial militancy was not an accident—it was a strategy brought to the unions by a left that was conscious of workers’ power to fight and win progressive changes both inside and outside of our workplaces through strikes and mass protest.
And we don’t have to go back decades to demonstrate the role that taking up political issues can have in galvanising industrial strength. In Italy last year, the radical left dockworkers in the Autonomous Port Workers’ Collective threatened to close the port of Genoa in support of the Global Sumud Flotilla for Palestine and called on the wider union movement to back them, helping spark two general strikes across the country that brought around 2 million workers into the streets. These strikes for Palestine provided important momentum and confidence that Italian workers needed to take on far-right Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s war and austerity budget the following December, in what became their third general strike in less than three months. One striking Italian worker reportedly summed up the dynamic with a placard that read: “we wanted to liberate Palestine, but instead Palestine liberated us”.
That the “extreme left” has ruffled the feathers of the likes of Hilakari and Hayes is a good sign. These people have ruined our unions and eroded the political traditions that have made them strong. The revival of the socialist left is what we need to finally take a stand against the warmongers and capitalists screwing us at work while committing atrocities overseas.
