Sally McManus arrived at the ACTU promising to shake things up. Nearly a decade later, she leaves having done exactly that – even if the movement remains smaller and confronting the same existential questions.
Her tenure will divide opinion because it contains two contradictory truths.
She was arguably the most politically effective ACTU secretary since Bill Kelty, overseeing a period in which organised labour enjoyed unfettered access to a federal government.
Yet she was unable to reverse the decades-long decline in union membership challenging the movement’s relevance.
McManus announced herself with a line that horrified conservatives and gave Labor heartburn. Asked in her first major television interview in 2017 whether workers should obey laws governing industrial action, she replied that she had no problem with breaking laws that were bad.
“I believe in the rule of law when the law is fair and the law is right,” she told ABC’s 7.30. “But when it’s unjust I don’t think there’s a problem with breaking it.”
The comments detonated in Canberra, with Coalition ministers accusing her of encouraging lawlessness, while Labor scrambled. Within the union movement, McManus became an overnight hero.
It set the tone for everything that followed.
McManus never attempted to be all things to all people. She was unapologetically partisan and comfortable arguing Australia’s workplace laws favoured employers. She was happy to pick fights too, sledging then Reserve Bank governor Phil Lowe as “living in Boomer fantasy land”.
But even her political opponents would describe her as personally likeable, strategic and thoughtful.
If the measure of success is political influence, few union leaders in recent decades have matched her.
Anthony Albanese’s first-term government delivered almost the entire ACTU industrial relations wish list through successive rounds of workplace reforms. When the prime minister junked much of Bill Shorten’s agenda after his 2019 election loss, the few things which survived were his industrial relations reforms.
After its 2022 win, Labor brought in multi-employer bargaining, expanded rights for labour hire workers, stronger protections for gig workers, criminal wage theft laws and “same job, same pay.” It was an extraordinary legislative haul.
The relationship between Albanese and McManus became one of the defining partnerships of Labor’s first term.
While Albanese never came from the union traditions that shaped predecessors such as Bob Hawke or Simon Crean, he won and maintained the movement’s confidence despite initial suspicions. McManus became one of his most trusted external allies.
After securing most of its industrial agenda, the ACTU increasingly turned to broader workplace demands – a four-day week and, recently, a campaign for a fifth week of annual leave.
To critics, they increasingly looked detached from the country’s economic reality, but such was her effectiveness the business community often shuddered.
As the nation wrestles with stubbornly weak productivity growth, the ACTU’s latest push landed awkwardly. The argument that another week of leave would largely pay for itself through happier, healthier workers failed to convince many economists – or Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who politely parked the proposal rather than embracing it.
That exchange captured a growing perception beyond employer groups that the ACTU, having largely won the industrial relations debate inside government, had begun searching for the next headline.
Even critics within the labour movement have bemoaned the organisation has been too focused on redistribution rather than growing the economy.
Yet reducing McManus’s leadership to those debates misses perhaps the most difficult chapter of her career. Her handling of the CFMEU will forever complicate assessments of her tenure.
For years, critics argued the ACTU looked the other way as allegations of lawlessness, corruption and intimidation mounted inside the construction union. As one veteran union official observed recently: “They didn’t go bad overnight.”
But once the extent of alleged criminal infiltration became impossible to ignore, McManus backed the extraordinary decision to place the CFMEU into administration – knowing it would fracture the union movement and make her a target.
The personal consequences were real. She altered her routines, moved between locations and lived under police security advice after threats from figures linked to the construction industry. Former allies branded her and president Michele O’Neil, who also announced her retirement on Monday, a traitor and sell-out. Blue-collar unions split from the ACTU over the administration.
Whatever criticism can fairly be made of McManus’s earlier reluctance, there was no doubting the personal price she ultimately paid for backing the clean-up.
The harder question for her successor is one McManus never fully solved.
Union membership sits at just over 13 per cent of Australian workers, down from around 40 per cent in the early 1990s. She attributed the 0.5 per cent membership rise in 2024 to younger workers who’d been battered by the pandemic, inflation, cost-of-living pressures and housing stress. Critics, however, suggest it was almost entirely because of growth in the public sector.
McManus rightly recognised that economic insecurity creates fertile ground for collective action. Whether that translates into a lasting revival remains uncertain.
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Rob Harrisis the national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Canberra. He is a former Europe correspondent.Connect viaemail.
