Part Two: What’s To Be Done About It?

By: GK, Trade Unionist and Socialist

Read Part One of this article “What Are We Actually Talking About?”

Why Rank and File Groups Exist at All

The contradiction between the membership and the leadership, outlined in Part One, is the material basis for rank and file organising. And once you understand that the logic becomes straightforward: if workers could genuinely pursue their collective interests through healthy, open, and active democratic processes within their union, there would be no reason to form an external group with comparatively few resources, no access to member lists, and none of the moral or legal authority that comes with being the official union.

In a genuinely healthy union, a rank and file group would be redundant. It wouldn’t and couldn’t emerge in any meaningful form, because workers with a grievance or a goal would simply organise within the union, with more resources, more authority, and more chance of success, while simultaneously strengthening the democratic vitality that makes a union worth belonging to.

But the majority of Australian unions are not in that condition. The democratic processes are degraded. The orientation of the leadership and the institution has diverged from the interests of the membership, for the structural and historical reasons laid out in Part One. In practice, what this means is that unions routinely ignore, stifle, or actively suppress the voices of members whose concerns cut across the historically developed interests of the union apparatus. If you’ve ever tried to raise something uncomfortable at a branch meeting, assuming your union still has branch meetings, you’ll have some sense of what this looks like up close.

So, What are the Options?

Workers who have goals their union won’t touch are not without choices. They are, however, choices of varying quality. Here is the full menu:

Option 1: Stay, pay, and accept it.

Continue in the union, keep paying dues, and watch collective problems go unaddressed while enjoying access to discount cards of dubious utility and industrial advice that has been so thoroughly risk managed it has lost most of its practical value. This is the situation facing the majority of existing union members today. It is also, not coincidentally, the option the union leadership will default to, even as they periodically acknowledge, in solemn tones, that there is a “crisis of declining membership” that they intend to do something about. Soon. At the next meeting.

Option 2: Leave.

Join the vast majority of Australian workers who have already walked. The previously unionised became disillusioned and departed or have aged out of the workforce. Young workers, many of them in industries that have never been properly organised in the first place, see no compelling reason to join and are not being recruited. The ACTU and its affiliates have looked at this generational haemorrhage and responded with… a steady continuation of the existing approach. The paralysis of the union movement in the face of the ALP’s 2024 administration of the CFMEU, an intervention by the supposed workers’ party against one of the major blue-collar unions in the country, was instructive. These are not organisations with a plan.

Option 3: Work within existing channels.

Attempt to bring about change through whatever internal processes the union provides, without forming an external body. In theory, this is the natural first response, and if it were genuinely possible, it would be the right one. In practice, the structural conditions described in Part One make meaningful self-correction extremely unlikely. The cultural and political walls built up over decades are not moved by a well drafted motion to the branch committee, assuming the branch committee has a quorum, which it probably doesn’t.

Option 4: Build a new union.

Once workers have encountered the internal barriers, starting fresh can seem enormously appealing. And it shouldn’t be ruled out. But it should not be the first resort, and anyone who tells you it’s straightforward has never tried it. Forming a viable new union requires sustained effort, significant political and material resources, coherent and capable leadership, and the organisational discipline to see it through. It is a serious undertaking that fails far more often than it succeeds.

There is also a strategic argument for exhausting the existing union first. If you walk away from a union without having clearly demonstrated, through organised effort, that it cannot be reformed, you split whatever remains of the membership, you leave behind workers who haven’t yet reached the same conclusion, and you deprive yourself of the political education that comes from having pushed the contradiction to its limits. You also potentially give the old structure a second wind: nothing rallies a sclerotic bureaucracy quite like the threat of a breakaway.

Worth noting: the current situation differs somewhat from the historical examples of unions being abandoned prematurely. When those arguments were made, the unions in question, however reactionary their leadership, still had mass membership. Leaving meant leaving behind a large body of workers. Today, with union density sitting at roughly 13% and falling, that calculus is different. The mass is already largely gone. The question of whether a rump institution is worth reforming or replacing is a live one, not a settled one.

Option 5: Form a rank and file group.

This is the option that offers the widest scope for action, and the one this series is primarily concerned with. A rank and file group allows workers to organise independently, free of the internal bureaucratic constraints, while retaining the possibility of harnessing the union’s existing resources and authority if they can build sufficient organised strength to shift the balance of power. It is not a comfortable option, and it will generate friction. That friction is, in a meaningful sense, the point.

Two Destinations, One Road

Once workers have decided to organise as a rank and file group, they are setting in motion a process that, if pursued with clarity and commitment, will eventually arrive at one of two outcomes:

Resolution: The organised pressure of the rank and file is sufficient to shift the union, to wrest control of its direction from the entrenched bureaucracy and reorient it toward the genuine interests of the membership. The union becomes, once again, an actual workers’ union. This is the preferred outcome. It preserves existing institutional capacity, keeps the membership together, and represents a genuine victory.

Rupture: The organised effort hits a wall that cannot be moved. The most politically coherent, focused, and sustained action by the rank and file cannot change the course of the union, cannot arrest its decline, and cannot make it function as a genuine instrument of worker power. At that point, the conclusion is forced: these workers need to leave and build something new.

Both outcomes represent progress. What matters most is that the rank and file action disturbs the existing equilibrium, that it sharpens and advances the contradiction rather than allowing it to stabilise into a new, slightly more uncomfortable version of the same managed decline.

The worst outcome is not rupture. The worst outcome is a rank and file movement that makes enough noise to feel significant, generates enough friction to be uncomfortable, and then dissipates, leaving the union apparatus shaken but intact, having learned just enough to be marginally better at managing dissent. That outcome serves no one except the people currently running things.

To avoid it, rank and file organising needs to be conducted with a clear-eyed understanding of the political landscape, a realistic assessment of what the union is and what it has become, and the strategic discipline to push contradictions toward resolution rather than letting them settle. The goal is not disruption for its own sake. The goal is power, specifically, returning it to the people it was always supposed to belong to.

The Danger of Winning the Battle and Losing the War

Here is a trap that rank and file groups fall into more often than any other, and it is all the more dangerous because it arrives wearing the costume of success.

Once a rank and file group organises effectively enough to cause genuine problems for the union leadership, the leadership will move to neutralise it. The sequence is predictable. First, they ignore the group, hoping it dissipates on its own, as most things do. Then, if it doesn’t, they attempt to discredit it: the members are “wreckers,” they have “political motivations” (rich, coming from people whose careers are built on factional ALP politics), they’re naïve, they don’t understand how things work, they’re damaging the union at a critical moment. There is always a critical moment.

But if the group cannot be dismissed, the leadership will move to option three: token reform. Just enough to take the heat out of the situation. Not enough to change anything that actually matters.

We have seen this recently. The belated and weak positions taken by several unions on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, positions that arrived only after an unprecedented wave of rank and file pressure across multiple unions, are a case in point. One would like to believe these moves reflected a genuine reckoning with what unions are supposed to stand for. In most cases, they did not. They were the minimum concession required to diffuse the pressure, carefully calibrated to satisfy enough members to quiet things down without disturbing any of the structural arrangements that matter. The officials would not have moved at all without rank and file pressure. But the response was proportioned not to the gravity of the issue, but to the amount of pressure required to make it go away.

A rank and file group that does not understand this dynamic will find the wind taken out of its sails, and some members will even feel they’ve won, when in fact nothing systemic has changed. Unless the group intends to reconstruct itself from scratch every time it wants to extract the next bare minimum concession, this tendency needs to be actively resisted. The target cannot only be the immediate concern. It must be the material conditions that produced that concern, which means the leadership and structures of the union itself.

There is a related danger: the rank and file group becoming preoccupied with its own survival as a rank and file group. We have established that the resolution to the crisis in Australian unions is either reform or extinction. A rank and file group that settles into comfortable coexistence with a declining union is like a lifeboat still tethered to the sinking ship, its occupants neither seizing the helm nor cutting the rope. The ship goes down, and the lifeboat goes with it.

The goal is not to give the existing union structure a new lease on life. Absorbing rank and file pressure while continuing to operate as before is not a victory for workers, it is a victory for the apparatus, dressed up to look like a concession. We must not be fooled by it, and we must not help bring it about.

What Victory Actually Looks Like

This brings us to the real objective, the one that conscious rank and file organising must keep clearly in view.

The “reform” of the union, properly understood, means the rank and file taking control of it: severing the union’s dependence on the ALP, rebuilding democratic structures that give workers genuine power over their own organisation, and transforming the culture of the institution from one oriented toward self-preservation and factional management to one oriented toward the interests of the membership.

It means not going to the castle walls and shaking our fists at the ramparts. It means storming them.

We should be careful not to fetishise rank and file groups as the highest form of workers’ power. They are not. A rank and file group, by definition, operates with limited resources, limited authority, and limited reach. It is a pressure mechanism, an important one, but not an end in itself. A genuinely militant and democratically controlled union is the only body with the size, the resources, and the institutional leverage to wield real power in the political and economic landscape. That is the prize. Not the occasional hard-won concession, not the bulk billed GP appointment thrown at workers as a sign of how much the union cares, but an organisation capable of fighting for and taking what workers need.

In the medium term, this means rank and file groups must orient toward taking over their unions. Ejecting the established bureaucracy. Replacing it with representative, democratic structures that are genuinely accountable to the membership. Doing so would transform the relationship between the rank and file and the union, and here is the logical endpoint: a truly successful rank and file group ultimately dissolves itself back into the reclaimed union. The external organising body becomes unnecessary because the basis for its existence has been eliminated. Workers don’t need an independent group to represent their interests inside the union when they control the union. The rank and file, in victory, becomes simply the membership.

This is not some distant abstraction. It is the only framework within which rank and file activity makes strategic sense. Anything short of it, small victories, managed coexistence, a seat at a table that’s still owned by someone else, is to assist the union apparatus in continuing to extract resources from members while delivering as little as possible in return, all while feeding the ALP machine and, through it, the broader political arrangements that keep capital comfortable.

If we keep losing, losing workers to disengagement, losing ground to the parliamentary duopoly, losing the argument that collective organisation is worth the effort it is because we do not control our own institutions. Top-to-bottom control of the union is the answer. Anything less is a holding pattern.

Goals: What the Rank and File Must Be Fighting For

With that framework established, we can turn to the practical question of goals, what a rank and file group should be working toward, and how.

A successful rank and file group must form with objectives that go beyond the immediate grievance. The immediate grievance matters, it is what brought people together, and it needs to be addressed. But if the group’s ambition stops there, it will either be bought off with a token concession or exhaust itself fighting the same battles repeatedly without ever changing the conditions that produce them.

The deeper goal, the one that must be a conscious political commitment, not a vague aspiration, is to eliminate the conditions that gave rise to the rank and file group in the first place. This means rebuilding genuine member control: restoring meaningful democratic structures, re-engaging workers in the life of the union, and ensuring that the union’s direction is set by its members rather than by a leadership whose interests have long since diverged from theirs.

This is the contradictory nature of rank and file activity: its ultimate goal is its own redundancy. Not formal dissolution, the group does not need to hold a vote to wind itself up, but the removal of the conditions that necessitated its existence. When workers have real, effective democratic power within the union, they don’t need an external body to advocate for them. The fight is to make that external body unnecessary.

This means rank and file groups must resist, very deliberately, the tendency to develop inward looking systems of self-reproduction. The group’s energy and momentum must remain oriented outward, toward the union, toward the transformation of its structures, toward the seizure of genuine control. The moment a rank and file group starts acting primarily to sustain itself, it has lost the plot.

None of this dictates the specific tactics. The activities of a rank and file group can and should be varied, not every action needs to engage the union directly, and not every campaign needs to be framed in terms of union reform. What matters is that the political objective remains clear and that the group’s overall trajectory moves toward it. That objective, democratic worker control of the union, is the beacon. Getting there will involve antagonism. The union leadership will label organised members as anti-union, as wreckers, as politically motivated troublemakers who don’t understand the real world. They will work to shut the group down as quickly as possible, because a coherent, capable, and purposeful rank and file group is an existential problem for people whose position depends on members remaining passive.

Expect it. Plan for it. And don’t mistake the label for the reality. The people fighting to make the union accountable to its members are not the ones damaging the union. The ones damaging the union have been doing so for decades, and they’ve been very well compensated for it.

Autonomy is Not Obstruction is the Point

The rank and file group must remain clear eyed about one thing above all else: its independence is not a tactical preference. It is the condition of its existence.

There will be pressure, sometimes subtle, sometimes direct, to bring the group back under the umbrella of the union. To work with the leadership, to avoid public antagonism, to channel energy through official processes, to demonstrate good faith by moderating demands. This pressure will often be framed in the language of unity. And unity is a fine thing, when it is real. What is being offered here is not unity. It is absorption. The antagonism is not being resolved; it is being suppressed, and the distinction matters enormously.

To hand decision-making power over the rank and file group’s activities to the union, to allow the union to set the terms of the group’s engagement, is to fundamentally misunderstand what gave rise to the group in the first place. The conditions that produced the rank and file action have not changed. The leadership has not transformed. The structural problems have not been addressed. A declaration of unity from the top does not alter any of that. What it does is neutralise the only organised force that was actually pushing toward a resolution, leaving the underlying problem to fester, now with the added complication that the workers who might have addressed it have been talked into standing down.

The leadership will call this a victory. Workers should call it what it is.

The Task: Take the Union Back

Which brings us, finally, to the task itself, stated plainly, because plainness is what the situation requires.

Under current conditions in Australian unions, the task of the rank and file group is to take over the union. Not to advise it. Not to pressure it from the outside indefinitely. Not to extract occasional concessions and declare moral victories. To win the positions that hold genuine decision-making power, the positions that currently function as the dam wall holding back the free expression of worker power, and to hold them.

This is achieved through organised, sustained rank and file campaigning: building support among the membership, contesting elections, developing capable leadership from within the group, and maintaining the political clarity to know why the fight matters beyond any individual ballot. The goal is not factional dominance for its own sake. It is the transformation of the union, its culture, its democratic structures, its relationship to members, so that it once again functions as an instrument of the workers who make it up, rather than an instrument of the apparatus that currently runs it.

This is not a fantasy. It has happened. The NTEU and the CPSU offer examples of substantial progress toward exactly this kind of transformation, driven by organised members who refused to accept that the union they paid into was beyond reclaiming. The path has been walked. It is difficult, it is long, and it requires a level of political seriousness and organisational commitment that is easy to underestimate, but it is the path forward.

Regaining control of our unions is not a secondary concern, something to attend to once more urgent matters are dealt with. It is the urgent matter. It is how workers regain the institutional power required to stop asking politely for what they need and start being in a position to demand and win it. It is how the rank and file stops being an external pressure group and becomes, once again, simply the membership of a union that belongs to them. That is the goal. That is the work. Let’s get on with it.