Everybody seems to agree that something has gone badly wrong for workers in Australia. Everybody, that is, except the leaders of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Reading communications from the peak body representing Australian unions is like visiting an alternate universe in which we’ve never had it so good. Today’s top union leaders seem uniquely unmoved by the stagnating living standards and frustrated hopes that are driving popular anger at the status quo. Instead of organising a fight back, the ACTU acts like a meek liberal NGO. Worse, it acts as a lobby in reverse: rather than lobbying the government on behalf of its members, it lobbies its members on behalf of the government.
The fundamental issue in recent years is that wages have failed to keep up with inflation. After a decade of wage stagnation beginning in the early 2010s, real wages fell amid the supply shocks of the early 2020s. A series of below-inflation wage rulings and interest rate hikes has ensured that the costs of these shocks have been borne by workers. The Reserve Bank projects that it will take until 2028 before real wages return to 2011 levels—the biggest sustained drop in living standards anywhere in the OECD in recent times.
Add to this a broken housing system that means renters need an income of $130,000 for an average rental property to be deemed “affordable”. Plus, an underfunded health system results in half of people skipping necessary care. Through all this, ACTU leaders have maintained their enthusiasm for a government that has allowed workers’ living standards to nosedive.
Union leaders can’t credibly claim that their inaction reflects the prevailing sentiments among workers. A June Redbridge poll found a record 63 percent of people think that society is headed “in the wrong direction”. A recent ANUpoll found that 70 percent think the government should definitely or probably reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. Nearly 80 percent think that governments definitely or probably should provide decent housing for those who can’t afford it. No wonder young people are moving to the left in large numbers, and staying there.
The ACTU has hosted conference after conference about the importance of organising young workers. It’s obvious that the most basic way to do this would be to organise a massive campaign to raise wages. So why is ACTU Secretary Sally McManus instead lauding paltry nominal pay rises from the Fair Work Commission? McManus called the commission’s recent annual ruling a “positive real wage increase”, adding, “It means relief is on the way for lower-paid workers to help keep up with price pressures and avoid the need to cut back on essentials like food or seeing a doctor”.
While the leader of the workers’ movement focused on the purported positives, the Fair Work Commission itself said something substantially different:
“The ‘real wage gap’ which has opened between the rate of the CPI and modern award wage rates has particularly affected living standards of the low paid, the majority of whom are modern award-reliant, and their capacity to meet their needs ... [W]e have concluded, regrettably, that it is not practicable in the current uncertain circumstances to award a real wage increase for employees reliant on modern award wage rates that would be sufficient to close the real wage gap entirely.”
The ACTU leaders have spent years promoting Labor’s piss-weak tweaks to tax and industrial legislation and assuring unionists that they don’t need to fight for anything better. ACTU communications read more like Labor ads than calls to action. Take the following:
A December 2022 email to union members promised: “New workplace laws will help get wages moving again”
Another, from June 2024, announced: “The Albanese government’s tax-cut plan ... will provide every Australian taxpayer with a cost-of-living bonus. That’s an extra $28 in their pocket each week”. The email added, with the energy of an infomercial presenter: “But that’s not all! The Albanese government’s Budget includes a $300 energy bill relief payment to every Australian household.” Forget that between 2023 and 2025, power costs surged 27 percent above the consumer price index.
A statement in June 2025 again touts as a “union win” a ruling to give 100,000 workers on the minimum wage a pay cut in real terms.
The same approach is embodied in the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), the representative body for Victorian unions. The VTHC describes itself as “the voice of Victorians at work”. But it doesn’t spend much time trying to find out what workers want or helping them raise their voices. The VTHC has bigger things to worry about—like turning over its headquarters to a massive effort to re-elect the unpopular state Labor government.
VTHC Secretary Luke Hilakari recently issued a public broadside against “complacent” Labor MPs. Don’t get too excited, though. The complacency Hilakari criticises them for has nothing to do with wages, schools or hospitals. He’s just upset that many of them are refusing to campaign seriously for another term in parliament. How urging absentee MPs to fight for another four years of seat-warming on the public purse counts as “union business” is anyone’s guess.
The job of selling Labor’s garbage offerings to workers is also taken on by affiliated unions.
The Australian Education Union leadership has been locked in a battle with its own members, urging them to accept a government offer that would have failed to address the crisis facing public schools. Right now, it’s a losing battle for the union leaders, in part because they blew much of their credibility by forcing through a massive pay cut in the last agreement.
Or take Labor’s 2026 federal budget, which contains $63.8 billion in cuts, including through the elimination of 28,000 public service jobs. At the centre is the government’s planned “overhaul” of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which aims to save $36 billion. While the government has sold this as necessary to confront shonky private providers rorting the system, only $900 million of these cuts will come from crackdowns on fraud. The overwhelming majority of savings will come from cutting 240,000 people from the scheme.
Incredibly, the unions that represent the most workers in the disability care sector have helped to sell this. The Health Services Union initially celebrated the cuts as “a genuine turning point for the scheme” and “an important step in the right direction”. The Australian Services Union issued a mealy-mouthed statement that euphemistically referred to funding “changes”, while its social media commentary described the budget as “massive slay”.
Many union leaders also act as enforcers for the bosses. They can be in blatantly right-wing unions such as the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, which has a record of colluding with the supermarket giants to slash penalty rates. They can also be in supposedly progressive unions such as the National Tertiary Education Union, which in recent years proposed a Jobs Protection Framework that would have allowed university bosses to slash wages by 15 percent.
Why the complicity?
How did the leaders of the union movement become cheerleaders for such a crap state of affairs? Why are they so indifferent to attacks on their members?
First, the decline in working-class living standards and weakening of union power haven’t affected the lives of those who lead the unions. Sally McManus takes home more than $200,000 a year—and she is far from the highest-paid union leader. United Firefighters Union National Secretary Peter Marshall’s annual salary averages around half a million dollars. The Australian Education Union’s Victorian branch president, Justin Mullaly, is preaching prudence to teachers fighting to catch up on years of lost pay, but receives an annual package of $228,678.
Just as MPs who pass legislation to gut school and health funding receive salaries that insulate them and their families from the impact of those decisions, so too are union officials inoculated against the effect of declining wages and workplace organisation.
As union activism has declined, generating fewer trade union militants with real organisational experience, the ranks of the union bureaucracy have been increasingly drawn from the middle classes. Unions today are more often than not staffed by former lawyers or student politicians. Past Labor leader Bill Shorten’s path is typical—from joining Labor at Monash University, he volunteered and served as an adviser for various Labor MPs, then got a job in a Labor-aligned law firm, before working his way up the ranks to lead the Australian Workers’ Union.
Just as important as the social origins and pay packets of union leaders are the opportunities that come from their proximity to power. There is a well-worn path from union offices to parliamentary benches and beyond. The current deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, was an assistant secretary of the ACTU; Greg Combet was parachuted from ACTU secretary to Rudd-era defence personnel minister. Some, like Martin Ferguson, go even further. From being president of the ACTU, he leapt to opposition benches in 1996, before later becoming the resources and energy minister, and going on to plum jobs at Channel 7, BP and various industry groups. He has spent the last decade advocating for expanded uranium mining, energy privatisation and wage cuts—all while remaining a paid-up Labor member! You really can have it all.
This revolving door reflects and reinforces the approach to unionism that has dominated since the 1980s: prioritising proximity to government and business—having a “seat at table”—over organising workers collectively. This is why union leaders urge loyalty to institutions such as the Fair Work Commission, which they claim can replace strike action with “expert” decisions made by ruling-class judges and economists.
It also means that maintenance of a Labor government is always a top priority for union leaders. No wonder they pull so many punches when Labor attacks union members, and attempt to generate hype for so many meaningless and symbolic Labor policies. This is an especially marked problem today when the most unionised workforces—nurses, teachers, civil servants—are in the public sector, meaning their employer is the same government that the union leaders are often unwilling to challenge.
Finally, to stay in the good graces of the powerful, union leaders frequently try to prove they can act as industrial police, imposing discipline and sacrifice on their members.
Take the aforementioned NTEU Jobs Protection Framework debacle. In explaining the rationale for this proposal at an RMIT University Q&A session, Secretary Matt McGowan said that the framework would give the union “a form of authority that it hasn’t had in over three decades ... And this will significantly improve the union’s ability to impact on the future structure and direction of the sector”. Translation: they were willing to trade away their members’ conditions for more influence for themselves. Thankfully, the proposal was defeated by a rebellion among the members.
Even after decades in which union leaders have managed the decline of their institutions while eroding workers’ consciousness and expectations, there is still a willingness to fight for something better when an opportunity arises. The current campaign of Victorian public-school teachers to catch up on years of lost pay shows this. In March, 35,000 teachers participated in a historic strike rally. Thousands of teachers choking Melbourne’s CBD and shutting down a vital service was a vivid illustration that unions are still the largest, and potentially most powerful, organisations of social change.
Since then, the battle has been against not just the state Labor government but also the leaders of the education union. The victory for a “no” vote against the latest offer, underpinned by determined campaigning by socialists in the union, shows that the union leaders don’t always get their way.
The model of unionism that socialists argue for in the teachers’ union—based on collective action rather than lobbying, on raising people’s expectations rather than telling them to accept crumbs—will be an essential part of rebuilding a left pole of opposition to the status quo. This is the only way we can start to shift the dial towards a society that puts workers first, rather than the rich and powerful.
