Around 500 people packed Coburg Town Hall in early February to celebrate the public launch of Members First, a reform ticket running for leadership of the United Workers Union (UWU). The crowd was impressive, and there was clearly a buzz in the air as I squeezed past a mix of union organisers, blue-collar workers and activists from the left.
A decade ago, I was a National Union of Workers (NUW) delegate at the Polar Fresh (now Coles) distribution centre in Truganina. We launched a momentous four-day strike of nearly 700 workers in 2016, which won improvements in wages and conditions that eventually flowed on to other warehouses as far away as Queensland. Although I’ve since moved on, several of the delegates who helped lead the strike with me still work there. I found their table, and we greeted each other with big smiles and hugs. We still share an unshakable camaraderie.
After pleasantries, we talked shop. The challenges workers face at the Coles Truganina DC would be all too familiar to workers across the industry. Managers use harassment and the threat of discipline to keep up pressure on workers to increase productivity. The wage rises and permanent jobs we won in 2016 have been steadily eroded by inflation and casualisation in the years since.
Our attention was brought to the front stage for the official proceedings. The speakers from the podium struck an energetic and militant tone. Members First headliners Tim Kennedy, Caterina Cinanni and Katie McGinn spoke about the need for a fighting, member-led union. We also heard from workers with some real industrial cred, including a couple of truly heroic farm workers, one of the troublemakers from Padre’s Coffee in Brunswick and a veteran of the impressive dairy strike in 2023, when 1,400 workers struck for two days across thirteen sites in Victoria.
This contest for the leadership of the UWU has been building since the formation of the union in 2019 from the amalgamation of the NUW, which largely covered warehouses, food manufacturing and farms, and United Voice (UV), with coverage including hospitality, security guards, child care and aged care.
Officials and organisers from the two unions have coalesced into factions vying for control of the UWU. In recent years, former UV officials have steadily driven former NUW officials out of organiser roles and cemented their control over the central union apparatus. Members First is the electoral project of the former leadership of the NUW, who aim to win leadership of the UWU at the union’s national convention later this year.
The outcome of this election will have real consequences for the union’s members. Unlike UV, or much of the rest of the union movement for that matter, the NUW was willing to organise workers and, at times, call strikes. Many of the most notable strikes that punctuated the otherwise dire industrial landscape of the last twenty years were NUW disputes. The most recent example was the unprecedented seventeen-day strike by more than 1,500 Woolworths warehouse workers in 2024, led by former NUW officials. Perhaps most impressive were their exemplary campaigns to organise precarious migrant farm workers in Victoria and South Australia.
UV avoided exertions like this at all costs. It was defined by extreme industrial passivity. Its flagship growth strategy in recent decades was the absolutely pathetic Hospo Voice, a “digital union” that aimed to avoid actually organising anyone to do anything. Its paid subscribers were offered little more than discounted movie tickets and barista courses. The tiered subscription model meant that anyone who wanted access to “personalised support” to win back their wages had to pay substantially more for the premium membership.
Members First is campaigning for democratic reforms that prioritise organising and building the union’s rank-and-file structures. According to their website, the most popular three demands are more face-to-face organising, more delegate training and the creation of a $1 million strike fund. All of these are quite moderate goals, but unlike the crime against unionism known as Hospo Voice, they at least point in the direction of organising workers and taking industrial action.
However, there were always limits to how far the NUW leaders were willing to go. Though at times they tried to dance around court injunctions against picketing, for example, they were rarely willing to defy them.
A top-down approach could also lead to real problems. Anyone who went along to any of the Woolworths picket lines in late 2024, for example, was struck by their passivity. Unlike our dispute at Polar Fresh, it seemed as though the union put little thought or effort into turning each worker into an activist, as the old socialist motto goes, or involving the strikers in reaching out to other workers and union members for solidarity. There was no serious attempt to disrupt scab warehouses, and beyond the community mobilisation to ward off a busload of scabs for one night, there was no effort to defy or even get around court injunctions against picketing. All of this limited the strike’s effectiveness, and the final outcome was not the smashing victory it could have been.
This was not an outlier. If we stick to the rules that are carefully designed to make us lose, how are we ever to start winning?
Members First also lacks important political dimensions. The draconian restrictions on union rights and the right to strike are enshrined in the Fair Work Act, which was created by the Rudd Labor government. The current Albanese Labor government has done almost nothing to improve workers’ rights, and even less to address the housing and cost-of-living crisis. Its obsequious devotion to the US and Israel throughout their genocide in Palestine and their war on Iran is beyond repulsive. Although Members First leaders attack the former UV officials for their lavish funding of “party politics” (they carefully avoid mentioning Labor by name), they have refused to criticise Albanese openly, let alone break with Labor. We desperately need an outspoken, left-wing challenge to the Labor Party in the union movement. Members First is not it.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Members First leaders were willing to call a strike of five Woolworths warehouses that, for all its limitations, put working-class power on the front page for a couple of weeks in 2024 is to their credit. Their organising efforts, particularly in the warehouses and farms, set them apart from the passivity of most union officialdom. Unlike most factional struggles in unions these days, there is a difference between the two sides in this case, and socialists should not be indifferent to the outcome. Socialists in the UWU should vote for and support Members First. If they win and roll out even a part of their NUW organising approach across the UWU, that would be a step forward.
For my old workmates at Coles, however, it won’t automatically solve all of their problems. They’ve had former NUW organisers since 2016, but that hasn’t stopped the memory of the strike from fading, or a sense of demoralisation from setting in. The reality is that we need more strikes, and we need to be prepared to defy the courts and break industrial laws.
We also need to fight the ALP and a government that endorses genocide and war. For this, we need more shop floor agitators, organisers and leaders. History shows that these can’t be created from above by any union leadership, no matter how well-intentioned it might be. We can play our part in creating such a layer through independent socialist organising among the rank and file.
