A-Infos (en) Australia, AnComFed: Picket Line - Why union leaders sell us out (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In November 1992, the state of Victoria was in shock. A new premier, 
Jeff Kennett, had just been elected, and was going on a rampage. 
Hundreds of schools were being closed, hospitals shuttered, tens of 
thousands of public sector workers sacked, and awards protecting 
workers' rights simply cancelled.
But then, something incredible happened. A state-wide 24-hour general 
strike was called, and workers responded with unparalleled fury. Almost 
one million people walked off the job. Everything, from factories to 
garbage collection to airports to office buildings, was brought to a 
standstill. Tens of thousands took to the streets in even small regional 
centres. 150,000 rallied in Melbourne. Overlooking state parliament with 
rows of police guarding it, a journalist from the Age overheard a 
striker comment, "We could take it in ten minutes if we felt like it."

Governments and employers across the entire country were stunned. The 
battle was on, and it looked like the workers had a real chance to win.

And then it was over. The leaders of Victorian Trades Hall and major 
unions, frightened by the spectre of all-out class war they had 
unleashed, called off the strikes and offered the government a 
'Christmas truce'. Rolling stoppages across a range of industries were 
wound down. When another state-wide strike was belatedly organised 
nearly five months later, the momentum had been lost, and almost all of 
Kennett's policies were implemented.

What had happened? Why had the leadership of Victoria's unions, 
seemingly at the absolute height of their power, called off the fight 
and thrown workers to the wolves? More to the point, why do union 
leaders seem to do this again and again?

Understanding unions
To get to the bottom of this, we need to understand union leaders as a 
social layer. In Australia, union secretaries earn around $250,000 to 
$500,000 per year, placing them amongst the top earners in the country. 
They preside over organisations with annual incomes in the hundreds of 
millions of dollars, and hundreds of staff. They enjoy substantial 
political influence, negotiate with some of the biggest companies in 
Australia, and many go on to lucrative political and corporate careers.

In other words, salaried union leaders have every reason to preserve 
their union as an institution, and their position within it.

This requires a difficult balancing act. To make any income, and to 
force employers and governments to negotiate with them, unions need 
membership. So, union officials must lead campaigns for better wages and 
working conditions, sign up members, develop workplace activists and 
delegates, and deliver the goods for workers. Otherwise, they have no 
members, no income, and no way to force employers to deal with them.

But there's another side to this. Union officials also need bosses to 
exploit workers. Otherwise, they have no fight to lead and no potential 
members to sign up. They need profitable and successful businesses, and 
they need capitalism. When union leaders like Sharon Burrows say things 
like, "The idea that unions would somehow want to undermine business is 
frankly absurd," it's not because they've been misled by right-wing 
ideology. It's because they're telling the truth.

Union leaders can never afford to completely surrender and sell workers 
out, though. If their members are unhappy or threatening to quit the 
union, or if employers are refusing to negotiate with them, they'll be 
more likely to organise strikes and industrial action simply to maintain 
their position. They still have to fight. But they'll only ever fight 
within narrow limits. They'll always stop short of really threatening 
bosses or their relationship with them, and they'll always stop short of 
really threatening capitalism. Union bosses ultimately depend upon our 
exploitation as workers, and simply want to negotiate the terms of that 
exploitation.

The task for workers
What this means for us is clear. We should join unions. They provide a 
measure of legal protection and are still what workers look to in order 
to organise. And we should support union officials whenever they act in 
our interests, because they can never afford to completely ignore their 
membership.

But we need to be ready to act independently if they try to contain us 
and wind things down. We have to be confident that we're the only ones 
who can organise our workplaces and know what our own interests are. We 
need to take on the task of organising our coworkers ourselves, building 
and running our own mass meetings, and developing structures of 
rank-and-file worker democracy that cannot be undermined from the 
outside. There are huge legal and organisational advantages to 
organising within unions, but there are also very real limits. We have 
to clearly understand what they are, and be ready to deal with them.

Time and time again, workers have shown that they can do thisfrom 
small-scale examples like Melbourne community legal centre staff who 
organised their own strike for Palestine in 2025, to the Australia-wide 
general strike by millions of workers in defiance of their union 
bureaucracy in 1969. Union leaders can take us so far, but the only 
people who can take us all the way, to a world without exploitation, are 
workers themselves.

https://ancomfed.org/2026/04/why-union-leaders-sell-us-out/
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