Part One: What Are We Actually Talking About?

By: George K, Trade Unionist and Socialist

Since the 1960s and 70s Australian unions have been declining in membership, militancy, and power. The Accords, the Fair Work Act, and the crippling association with the Australian Labor Party has resulted in a critical weakening of the will and ability to organise workers and a drift towards “service unionism”. 

For workers’ power to grow within Australia a reorientation towards genuine mass organising and the exercise of industrial power is absolutely necessary, which in turn requires a concerted and focused political reorientation of unions. However, political conditions still prevalent today have elevated a union leadership that is unable, or unwilling, to reorient itself to militant organising, let alone taking the ALP to task for their sustained betrayal of Australian workers. 

In this two part article we explore the basis for the need for union renewal through an activated, proactive and astute membership that challenges the existing leadership, and discuss the political considerations these groups must grapple with in order to bring about the much-needed revitalization of a militant Australian workers’ movement.

Firstly, What is a Rank and File Group?

Rank and file groups are associations of union members that have formed to confront a particular issue or challenge that the existing union structures are failing, or refusing, to address. They operate within established unions but organise independently of them. Their members are typically ordinary workers: people who don’t hold senior leadership positions or wield significant power over union activities, whether as elected reps or paid officers. They work both inside and outside the formal structures of their union, with the goal of pushing that union to actually do something about the particular issues that brought the group into existence in the first place.

Crucially, a rank and file group is not under the control of the union leadership. If a group of members is answerable to the leadership, it isn’t independent, and if it isn’t independent, it isn’t really a rank and file group – it’s a committee. Rank and file groups exist precisely because the established union structure and/or leadership is ignoring, failing to address, or comprehensively bodging the issues that matter most to ordinary members.

The Contradiction at the Heart of It All

To understand why rank and file groups emerge, we need to understand the fundamental tension that produces them.

On one side, we have the basic purpose of a union: a tool that enables workers to collectivise, build power, and use that power to win better conditions, push back against the demands of employers, and at times mount a genuine challenge to the way things are organised. Unions, at their core, are an organised expression of workers’ collective strength.

On the other side, you have what Australian unions have actually become: organisations that have adapted, over decades, to surviving within a capitalist political and economic environment. That adaptation has come at a cost. The more unions have shaped themselves to fit the world as it is, the more they’ve compromised their original purpose. Short term survival has quietly displaced long term ambition. The radical edge, to varying degrees, has been sanded down.

This short term survival logic is inseparable from the parliamentary cycle, and particularly from the unions’ long, complicated, and increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the Australian Labor Party. More on that shortly.

External events, like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, can act as powerful catalysts for the formation of rank and file groups – for example Unionists For Palestine formed in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But they are catalysts, not causes. They accelerate and crystallise a contradiction that already exists: the gap between ordinary members, from whom the union draws its power, and the leadership and structures that actually control what the union does and says. That gap has widened over time, for reasons we’ll explore more fully in a later piece.

The practical result is this: robust democratic processes within unions have been hollowed out. The mechanisms that would allow ordinary members to actively shape the direction of their union, to pursue their long term, collective interests rather than the institutional interests of the union apparatus, have been weakened or removed. Rank and file action is, in part, an attempt to recover that ground. It’s a corrective mechanism. Not an ideal one, and certainly not one that should need to exist, but here we are.

None of this is to say that leadership and/or organisational structure is inherently the problem. Unions need both. The problem is specifically the divergence of interests between the membership and the leadership, and the conditions that produced it. Understanding those conditions is essential, both to fix the current situation and to avoid recreating it.

The ALP: A Ball and Chain in a Suit

If there is one single dynamic that has most damaged Australian unions, it is their relationship to parliamentary politics — and specifically their historic symbiosis with the Australian Labor Party.

Whether the ALP ever genuinely served workers’ interests is, at least, arguable. What is not arguable is that it does not do so today. The ALP is a party of capital. So is the Liberal Party. On the questions that actually define Australia’s role in the world:  Western imperialism, the so-called “international rules-based order,” and the broader architecture of global capital, there is no meaningful difference between them. Domestically, the differences exist but are slim and getting slimmer. 

The terms of political life in Australia are set by the pendulum swing between a rhetorically “pro-union” party (the ALP) and an “anti-union” party (the Liberal National Party, although this is currently being challenged from the right by One Nation, also anti-worker), both operating comfortably within a neoliberal framework that, whatever the branding, fundamentally suppresses the organising power of workers. Look no further than the Fair Work Commission for a masterclass in how to make workers feel like they have rights while ensuring those rights are largely decorative.

Within this framework, the ALP uses its historical connection to working-class struggle as political currency, cashing cheques written by a previous generation of genuine labour movement fighters. It is a vestigial position, and it is coming apart. Union membership is in long term decline, the ALP’s base is eroding, and other parties, unburdened by the weight of that history, are moving into the space. 

The ALP today is politically disoriented, caught between a self image as the left wing party of the workers and a reality in which it has no coherent ideological commitments, no serious dedication to workers’ struggles, and a demonstrated willingness to act against workers’ interests when it suits. The clearest recent example: the ALP-led federal government’s 2024 decision to place the CFMEU into administration, an extraordinary intervention against one of the most significant blue collar unions in the country, carried out by the party that still, somehow, calls itself the workers’ party. 

The ALP is the friendly face of neoliberalism. That friendliness is precisely what makes it dangerous: the left wing rhetoric, now in increasingly short supply, provides cover for policies that a Liberal government would be loudly condemned for. The faithful cling to the memory of Gough Whitlam. The cynical cling to the same memory for different reasons. Neither can point to much since. 

Meanwhile, on industrial policy they are being out-flanked on the left by the Greens and emerging parties such as the Victorian Socialists. Their platforms, if implemented, would meaningfully empower workers to organise and take industrial action beyond the tightly controlled and deeply restrictive windows prescribed by the Enterprise Bargaining System. Compare their policies with the ALP’s 2023 Platform and try to argue otherwise with a straight face. While this may have seemed a faintly absurd idea not long ago, it tells you everything you need to know about how far the ALP has travelled.

The Parasite Problem: When the Symbiosis Turns

What was once, at least arguably, a useful arrangement – the interlinkages between unions and the ALP – has curdled into something quite different. What exists today is a symbiosis between the ALP and union leadership that is, in plain terms, parasitic upon the membership and the broader working class.

The mechanics are straightforward enough. Union leaders enjoy privileged access to future roles inside the institutionalised union movement and the parliamentary ALP. ALP politicians, having done their time, rotate onto the boards of corporations and superannuation funds, a career trajectory so well worn it practically has its own highway signs. Both groups have therefore correctly identified that radical industrial action poses a serious risk, not to workers, but to them: to their career paths, to the institutional arrangements that sustain them, and to their understanding of what a union is actually for. At the same time, the drift from organising to servicing, politically convenient for a moribund ALP, creates an environment which selects for union officials that will prosper under such conditions, and thus, without any intervention the cycle produces and reproduces itself. And so, over time, the fundamental antagonism between workers and employers has been quietly set aside in favour of a more comfortable role: mediator. Honest broker. Responsible partner in the enterprise.

Some call this the corruption of the union’s basic purpose. Others frame it as the victory of a moderate, amelioratory tendency over a more confrontational one. Either way, workers come out worse.

Service Unionism: The HR Department You Pay For

The end product of this process is service unionism, the systematic depoliticisation of workers and the elimination of genuine member agency, all in the service of the ideologically corrupted and bureaucratic union structure and its ALP patron.

Rather than organising workers to fight for the maximum they can win, today’s service union functions as roughly the third arm of human resources. It offers:

1. A limited insurance policy: helping individual workers claim their legal entitlements within the Fair Work Commission framework, assuming you can navigate the wait times

2. A negotiation body: striking deals between workers and bosses rather than fighting for the best possible outcome for members

3. A reliable source of funding, legitimacy, warm bodies, and votes for the ALP

This does essentially nothing to advance workers’ collective interests, but it does keep the ALP resourced for the never ending parliamentary contest: a contest in which the dues of paying union members and the funds flowing through union aligned superannuation are of considerable importance.

The decline in union membership speaks for itself. Workers are not stupid. Many have looked at their union, weighed up the fees, and concluded they’re paying a subscription that returns approximately nothing. They’re not wrong. A union that has traded militancy for managed decline is not a compelling offer.

Under the current arrangement the short term reproduction of unions is genuinely tied to the fortunes of the ALP, but these unions, shaped as they are toward service provision and mediation, are simply not fit for purpose when it comes to advancing workers’ interests. As workers, we need to look further than the next parliamentary term and recognise that the back and forth of the three year electoral cycle is not a strategy. Instead, it is a holding pattern, the institutional legacy of a relationship that has long since stopped serving us.

There is also a structural problem with even having this conversation: discussions about the long term direction of unions cannot easily occur within unions, because those discussions immediately threaten to disturb the ALP-union connection on which the immediate survival of the union apparatus depends. Union leaders have no incentive and no inclination to initiate the kind of renewal that would be required to actually revitalise the movement, because genuine revitalisation would mean disrupting or destroying the very relationships that sustain them. Without workers prepared to push that disruption from below, nothing changes. The union declines, the ALP drifts further right, and the circuit remains unbroken.

Does Anyone Actually Represent Anyone?

Union legitimacy rests on a particular claim: that union leadership represents the workers who make up the membership, acting as their democratically chosen voice. It is worth interrogating that claim honestly, even if the answer is, to put it gently, uncomfortable.

Here is the situation as it actually stands:

A. Membership has collapsed.

According to the ABS, union membership has fallen from 42% in 1992, itself already a decline from over 50% in the 1970s, to 13.1% in 2024. One might have argued in 1992 that unions didn’t represent the majority of workers. In 2026, that argument doesn’t need to be made, it’s simply a fact. The value proposition of service unionism, bundled with automatic political support for one half of the duopoly of capital, has, shockingly, failed to inspire mass membership.

(ABS Trade Union Membership Data: Trade union membership, August 2024 | Australian Bureau of Statistics)

B. Within that 13.1%, participation is a fraction of a fraction.

Across many unions, participation in the democratic structures, where those structures exist in any meaningful form, is vanishingly low. Branch committee positions sit vacant. Branches operate without elected representatives. Delegates are scarce, and where they exist, they are frequently not engaged, not consulted, and not listened to. Uncontested leadership elections are common. In some unions, the outgoing leadership essentially arranges its own succession, ensuring that the same passive, atrophied governing philosophy carries forward with minimal disruption. Democracy technically observed. Democratic in spirit, less so.

C. The structures themselves are often designed to limit participation.

Many unions simply do not have democratic mechanisms that allow ordinary members to contribute meaningfully to day to day activities or longer term strategic direction, even though, notionally, everything the union does is being done for those members. Some unions have adopted a corporate structure: an unpaid board elected in theory to direct a fully professionalised union apparatus, but in practice heavily guided by the interests of that same apparatus, headed, in some cases, by someone with the job title of CEO. Other unions maintain democratic processes that look fine on paper but are routinely obscured or quietly undermined. Regular members’ meetings are not standard. The ability of ordinary members to communicate with the leadership that runs the union on a daily basis, let alone influence it, is severely limited.

D. The electoral mandate barely exists.

A 15% voter turnout is considered a strong result in an Australian union election. Fifteen percent of an average union density of roughly 10% of the workforce means that somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5% of workers have voted for the leadership of a given union, and that’s assuming a single candidate swept every vote, which is never the case – the real figure is smaller still. To claim, under these conditions, that the leadership represents the members, let alone the broader workforce, requires a fairly heroic definition of “represents.” Yes, technically, they won an election. So does every candidate in an election no one knows is happening, against opposition no one organised, with a turnout that would embarrass a strata committee. And critically: minimal effort is made to change this. One cannot help but notice that the leadership appears remarkably comfortable with the status quo.

A Vacuum Waiting to Be Filled

The picture that emerges from all of this is not complicated, even if it is dispiriting. The historic relationship between Australian unions and the ALP has produced a situation in which the upper echelons of union leadership, and union aggregations like the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Victorian Trades Hall Council, and Unions NSW, are bound to the ALP in a relationship that has, at best, presided over a steady decline in union membership, workplace conditions, real wages, and worker power. At worst, it can fairly be described as parasitic: workers provide the dues, the numbers, and the political legitimacy, while their actual interests go largely unrepresented in the arrangement that consumes those resources.

The decline of the unions and the rightward drift of the ALP are not separate phenomena, they are parts of the same process. And that process has left workers in a political vacuum. Vacuums, as history consistently demonstrates, do not stay empty for long. The question is what fills this one and who does the filling.

That is where rank and file organising enters the picture. Which is exactly what Part Two is about.

Bibliography

Australian Bureau of Statistics – Trade Union Membership
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/trade-union-membership/latest-release

Australian Greens Industrial Relations Policy
https://greens.org.au/policies/employment-and-workplace-relations 

Australian Labour Party 2023 Platform
https://www.alp.org.au/media/3569/2023-alp-national-platform.pdf  

Media Entertainment And Arts Alliance – About Us https://www.meaa.org/Public/Contents/YOUR_UNION/About_us.aspx

Victorian Socialists Industrial Relations Policy https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/policies/workers-and-unions