‘It was the first time they had heard Alan Jones afraid’: Sally McManus (2024)

Sally McManus is secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the first woman to hold that position, and she has never been more influential than now. I spoke to her on Thursday.

Fitz: Sally, as the most powerful person in the union movement, I understand your own activist awakening started at school, supporting striking teachers.

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SM: Yes, in the 1990s, Nick Greiner was the first neoliberal premier of NSW and when he began sacking teachers, I helped organise for lots of us from Carlingford High to go on a protest – and there must have been over 50,000 of us students coming from all over the city converging on Parliament House! I’d never been to anything like that in my life, and it was incredibly inspiring and empowering, a life-changing episode. For the first time I understood both the power of the collective – getting together people all pushing in the same direction – and the joy of achieving results through taking united action.

Fitz: And working at Pizza Hut – thick crust, hold the anchovies and pineapple – also helped form you?

SM: I’ve had around 10 jobs since the age of 14. I’ve been a cleaner, a general hand and a Pizza Hut delivery driver at the Seven Hills store, which was one of the busiest in the country. We were never busier than State of Origin nights, which were pretty full on and actually very dangerous, when delivering to people under the influence, which saw many assaults. Early on, the issue for me was juniors not being paid the same as older ones, though doing the same work. Later, we were going backwards because we were being paid just a dollar extra for every pizza we delivered, but it was at the same time as there was a spike in petrol prices. Again, it was our union that protected us, and improved our conditions.

Fitz: As president of the Macquarie University Union, at the age of just 19, you led the ban on campus smoking to protect the workers from cancer – well before the rest of the country caught up with smoking bans – and then you headed up the Australian Services Union, organising workers in the call-centres and in the IT industry. But I love, on the story of your rise, the Alan Jones angle! Tell all ...

SM: It was a bit over a decade ago, and Jones was going on about how Julia Gillard should be put into “a chaff bag,” and sunk at sea, and how women were “destroying the joint”. And there was a whole lot of us who asked, “when are we going to fight back about this?” So I set up a Facebook page called Destroy the Joint and started recruiting people, like Jenna Price. We ran a big campaign targeting sponsors of Alan Jones’ show, calling on people not to buy their products if they continued advertising with him.

Fitz: Was it a bitter satisfaction for you to see Jones’ sponsors run screaming for the hills, or joyous?

SM: Absolutely joyous. The best thing of all was the CEO of Mercedes-Benz in Germany, writing a letter to Jones which became public, broadly saying “these aren’t our values, and we want our Mercedes back from you!” He had to give it back. Jones then reached out to some people in the union movement and said “what can be done to stop Sally McManus?” and they reported back to me that they’d “never heard him scared before”.

Fitz: RAH! Would it be fair to say that it was your success in the Destroy the Joint campaign which propelled you to becoming the first woman head of the ACTU five years later?

SM: That would be a nice story, but truth is no, not really. That was an extension of everything I’d learnt as the leader of the Australian Services Union, and we had just won the biggest pay increase for 200,000 community workers of up to 40 per cent. That was more important than bloody Alan Jones.

Fitz: One way or another though, there you are, sitting in the seat of giants, following the likes of Bob Hawke, Bill Kelty and Greg Combet in the position. Was it intimidating to inherit and live up to such a legacy?

SM: Absolutely. I knew the history of it. I knew the absolute honour and privilege of having such a role, representing the Australian workers. I know it is the best job that I’ll ever have, and I treasure it every day. I want to live up to what working people need and the legacy of the whole union movement.

Fitz: Our mutual friend, Jenna Price, says to me that when it comes to the ACTU, “Sally’s like a nun, married to the movement”. Is that fair?

SM: [Laughing, wryly.] Yeah, that’s fair.

Fitz: I don’t know if you’ve got a partner or not, and it’s none of my damn business, but if you do, it must be hard for that partner and...

SM: I have no partner, bar two million union members, and that takes up a lot of time.

Fitz: And in that role, what is the overall star you steer by?

SM: To lift the power of working people, by them organising and acting collectively. That’s it. You can have various improvements of this and that – with improved wages, hours and conditions – but in the end it comes down to how much power and capacity the workers have themselves to be able to bring that about. So it’s not change coming from above, from the bosses, it’s coming from below, from us.

Fitz: Let’s hope you’ve got another decade in the role. But if not, what would you hang your hat on right now, for things you have achieved in your first seven years?

SM: All of these things are achievements of the team, but the first is the Labor government has passed four key bills that give workers better rights. These new laws increase workers’ job security, like giving labour hire, casual and gig workers better rights. They also increase workers’ bargaining power so that they can get better pay rises, and stops employers having too much power in bargaining. There’s also new laws about women being treated respectfully at work. And finally, there are new laws around stopping wage theft – so it’s now a criminal offence to not pay workers what they are entitled to, and there’s better ability for workers to be able to get their money back.

Fitz: And secondly?

SM: And secondly I’m proud of the role that the union movement played during the pandemic, establishing JobKeeper, and keeping workers safe and secure in what was an extremely difficult time. Even before COVID shut everything down, we produced a paper about the need for what became JobKeeper. Scott Morrison immediately ruled it out. Then we went about building a coalition of community groups and employers who supported it. It was a big team effort by the union movement, including Greg Combet, working on both the plan and as a key adviser to Morrison in that national advisory body during COVID. Morrison finally came on board. The whole thing preserved the security of the workers and actually kept the economy together in tough times.

Fitz: These days, are you satisfied with the Albanese government?

SM: Yes. It has not been easy for them. They’ve come to power inheriting post-pandemic inflation, and it’s obviously been very tough for Australian working people, with the increases in the cost of living. But the changes the Albanese government has made in terms of changes to workers’ rights are actually making a difference now because wages are now moving. And they’ll continue to move into the future, whereas for the whole previous decade they were going absolutely nowhere and living standards were going backwards, because the working people didn’t have enough power.

Fitz: Sure. But even Blind Freddie and Bland Frieda can see that the gap in this country between the rich and the poor is getting larger. Is the Albanese government doing enough to try and close that gap?

SM: Well, like I said, what you’ve got to do is give workers the power so they are able to close it, and that obviously doesn’t happen overnight. But what the government has done is rebalance things so that workers can stand up to employers and get their fair share of wages and profits. They have also directly supported pay rises for the lowest paid and for aged care workers, these pay rises would not have happened without their support.

Fitz: John Howard once said that if in a national crisis he had to choose a national unity cabinet, the one Labor Party person he’d pick would be Kim Beazley. When you look at the ranks of Coalition shadow cabinet ministers, is there one who you think, “You’re OK, you get it, you actually care about the workers”?

SM: I didn’t mind the former minister for Indigenous affairs, Ken Wyatt. He was a person in the previous government who actually consulted with unions. But there is no one in the current shadow cabinet now who is like that.

Fitz: Are you at least on Peter Dutton’s side with his proposed migration cuts? Traditionally union movements oppose large-scale skilled migration, so do you favour the Coalition position – as unclear as the detail is – over Labor’s?

SM: No. We think Dutton is being political and wanting to blame migrants for the shortage of housing that their governments have caused by decades of policy decisions of not investing in public housing. We support a migration policy that addresses real skill shortages, properly assessed, not one driven by bosses that leads to the abuse of migrant workers as it was under previous governments. We also do not support a system that is about temporary guest workers instead of permanent migration. The current government has been trying to fix all this.

Fitz: Your predecessor Greg Combet went on to have a successful political career. Do you have your eye on a seat in parliament?

SM: I have no ambitions to go into parliament and never have.

Fitz: Do you at least hang out with anyone from the other side of the aisle, as in employers, the big-end-of-town business brigade, the corporate titans?

SM: I don’t hang out with anyone at all from the big end of town. No one. I am not in those circles and have no interest. It’s not personal, it is just not my world. My friends, the ones I hang out with, are unionists, youth workers, gardeners and bird watchers.

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Fitz: Who’s the most impressive adversary you’ve encountered in your seven years as ACTU secretary?

SM: Michaelia Cash is the most relentless adversary. She never stops and never turns off.

Fitz: I sometimes see figures in stories which say the Australian union movement is dying, because the members are not there any more. What were the numbers at their peak, and what are they now?

SM: At the peak back in the 1950s they were nearly 60 per cent of workers, and they’re now down to about 15 per cent. The reason there’s been this massive decline, and it’s been the same around the world, is so many of the heavily unionised manufacturing industries in Australia are now no more. Plus, when John Howard took away supports for membership, there was big decline in union numbers because of that. So it was difficult for unions in a situation where the laws worked against you, but they’re in a better environment now. So rather than having hostile laws that basically made it really hard for us to do our job, they’re now neutral. Not supportive ... neutral. So that makes a big difference, and I think that with the increase in corporate power the world is starting to see an uptick in union membership as workers realise the only way to protect their rights is through collective action.

Fitz: What do you see as the future of the union movement in Australia?

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SM: We will always be here through thick and thin. We’ve recently seen off some very hostile governments. We are still here and they are not. I see the future as the next generation of young people taking over, looking at things like shorter working hours, dealing with the consequences of climate change and AI – which will have a big impact. Unless workers start flexing their muscle – and the only way to do that is through their unions – big tech and big business will have it all their own way.

Fitz: Do you see AI wiping out swathes of the working population? Is it terrifying?

SM: Yes, and no. AI in itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s just about whether or not it gets used with the consent of workers for the common good, or whether it gets used just to wipe out jobs and increase the profits of the few. You can see that AI would have a lot of positives in terms of medical technology and diagnostics, stuff like that. But if workers have no voice, and if we don’t see the benefits in terms of increasing productivity, and all of that just gets imposed on us, it will be the opposite. So I’m basically I guess, saying that it will be up to us about whether it’s terrifying or whether it’s a benefit. It is up to the unions, and collective action whether it will be good or bad.

Fitz: And that’s a wrap! Do you ever order pizzas to be delivered from Pizza Hut?

SM: I know far too much about how they are made, so these days I give them a miss!

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