On this day 50 years ago, Bob Hawke was elected ACTU president. The anniversary is a stark reminder of how diminished and discredited the union movement has become since Hawke brought the ACTU’s influence and authority to its zenith in the 1970s and set it up to play a key role in the economic reforms of the 80s and 90s.
Today, the union movement is bleeding members, many of its officials have been prosecuted for criminality or corruption, and its leaders are so far removed from Hawke’s unique talents as an advocate and conciliator it is difficult to imagine they belong to the same organisation he elevated to national prominence.
When Sally McManus was elected ACTU secretary in 2017, it was hailed by many as a defining moment for the movement — the first woman to be secretary. McManus, a lifelong union activist, had masterminded the Build a Better Future campaign in 2016. Big things were expected.
But McManus’s 2½ years as secretary have been bad for the union movement. She said her “No 1 priority” was to increase members. The latest figures show union members as a proportion of the workforce falling to a pitiful 14.6 per cent and about 8 per cent to 9 per cent in the private sector. The union movement continues to shrink at a rapid rate at a time of stagnant wages, low growth and insecure work.
When McManus chose to defend rather than distance the ACTU from the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union for its serial law-breaking on the ABC’s 7.30 program, it marked a new low for the union movement. “I believe in the rule of law where the law is fair,” McManus said. “But when it’s unjust, I don’t think there’s a problem with breaking it.”
There has never been a union in Australia’s history that has broken more laws in more states or been so repeatedly rebuked by judges utterly exasperated about their contempt for the legal process than the CFMEU. Yet McManus has defended this rogue militancy time and again rather than take a principled stand. It is not the approach of her predecessors. The Hawke government, with the support of the ACTU, deregistered the CFMEU’s predecessor, the Builders Labourers Federation, in 1986.
Can you imagine a Bill Shorten or Anthony Albanese-led Labor government taking such action with the support of the ACTU leadership? Hawke urged Shorten to expel the CFMEU from the party. His plea was ignored.
McManus was initially slow to condemn John Setka, the Victorian CFMEU leader, even though the details of his vile and menacing harassment of his wife were widely known. McManus, encouraged by other union leaders, finally urged Setka to resign, but he has so far ignored her. It speaks volumes about her authority. If McManus were serious, she would seek to expel the CFMEU from the ACTU.
More than $15m of union members’ money was wasted by McManus’s Change the Rules campaign designed to help Labor win the federal election. The ACTU’s official review, obtained by The Australian’s Ewin Hannan last month, concluded that it failed to resonate with voters because they found it confusing and complex, and it did not cut through. Spending this amount of money for zero return is unforgivable. Yet McManus has continued to tweet #ChangeTheRules as recently as two weeks ago.
The ACTU was hoping that a Labor government would help it arrest the decline in union members by providing it with new laws that would strengthen their capacity to bargain in workplaces. McManus invested heavily in a Labor victory. The truth is that unions have failed to maintain their relevance because they are no longer influential in most workplaces or in public policy debates.
It is fantasy to think the ACTU or Labor would support the Coalition’s Ensuring Integrity Bill, which is aimed at strengthening union governance by making it easier to deregister unions and expel officials for disreputable and illegal conduct. Labor is totally beholden to the ACTU these days. But if a union official has done nothing wrong then they surely have nothing to fear from these laws, which are likely to be amended by the Senate crossbench.
When Hawke, then the ACTU’s research officer and advocate, defeated ACTU secretary Harold Souter by 399 to 350 votes at the ACTU congress on September 10, 1969, it was the dawn of a new era for the union movement. The ACTU became a leading contributor to economic and social policy debates. Hawke was a skilled negotiator and gained a reputation for solving protracted disputes. He was a dynamic advocate, recognised for his intelligence and larrikinism, and was widely respected.
Some, though, saw him as divisive and his occasional temper tantrums diminished his appeal. He was characterised as a left-wing unionist because he had the support of left-wing and communist-linked unions. But, in truth, he was always moderate and pragmatic and worked well with centre-right unions, which later formed his power base. The ACTU became a key partner in the major economic and social policy reforms during the Hawke-Keating government. Led by secretary Bill Kelty and presidents Cliff Dolan, Simon Crean and Martin Ferguson, the ACTU understood the national interest and had zero tolerance for illegality or fraud. Its leaders were respected and admired, and had influence as a result.
It is no surprise that in his final years Hawke lamented what had become of the ACTU. He despaired over the inability to stem the loss of members, worried that it no longer had a key voice on economic and social policy matters, that it had turned a blind eye to the criminality of the CFMEU, that it wasted so much money on pointless campaigns and was no longer attracting the quality of leaders that it once did.
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