Unions
Ready to rumble
She isn’t afraid of the biff and she has a keen eye for beauty. New ACTU Secretary Sally McManus talks to The Lamp about the challenges facing working people.
You’ve been ACTU Secretary for 6 months now. What’s your assessment of the health of the union movement?
The union movement is on the front foot and growing in confidence. You can feel that wherever you go across the country. I spend a lot of time talking to members and what I get from them is that they are sick of a system that’s stacked against them. They are hurting at work with pressure on wages and employers having too much power. They are feeling inspired to be part of a movement that is going to change the rules.
But union membership has been in decline for some time now. How are we going to turn this around?
Joining a union or standing up for your rights or better is a hard decision if you are a casual worker or labour hire, or if you are on a temporary work visa.
Workplace laws have changed and allowed employers to exploit the loopholes to make workers insecure. We can do something about this simply by changing our workplace laws and making them fair again. I think that will make a difference to people wanting to join a union.
We’re also looking at technology to make it easier to join a union. We are progressing some technological innovations that will enable that.
What are the burning issues that the union movement has to confront?
Our main focus is on the issue of inequality, which is at a 70-year high. To address this there needs to be fairer distribution of wealth. Since the GFC most of the wealth has gone to the top 1 per cent. There are two important ways of doing something about that. The first is making sure people have strong enough rights in order to win pay rises from their employers so wealth is being distributed fairly. Secondly, it is important to change the tax laws. The fact that many profitable corporations paid no tax in Australia last year is appalling and the fact that millionaires don’t even pay the Medicare levy is unacceptable.
Do you think the union movement has been a bit too “polite” in dealing with politicians and business – that we need to develop a harder edge?
Things have changed really rapidly. A lot of employers in our country are big multinational corporations. They don’t think about social responsibility and they are much harder in the way they make money. They will move things offshore to make bigger profits. They don’t care about the consequences when they do that.
They have become harder edged and we absolutely need to become harder or else we will just get walked over. We can’t operate like before when we all sat around the board table and everyone respected everyone’s position. They not only don’t want us at the board table; they don’t want us to exist at all.
You’ve said neoliberalism “has run its course”. What’s your vision for an alternative way forward?
Neoliberalism was about getting governments out of the way. I’m a believer that there is a very important role for government. Let’s remember what governments are – it’s us, the people, who decide the type of society we want. We need a strong union movement that keeps politicians honest, but we also need political parties brave enough to make the changes needed to deal with inequality.
Malcolm Turnbull has been openly hostile towards you. What’s that all about?
The Liberal party always resorts to bashing unions when things are bad for them. They’d like to have union leaders who are compliant and always agree with them, that aren’t going to challenge the status quo. So I suppose they find it confronting that I’m not doing that. For me the views of Malcolm Turnbull or The Australian newspaper don’t concern me because I don’t work for them. I work for union members. They are the people I represent. They are the people I am going to go out and fight for.
Your Facebook page has beautiful photos of birds and wildlife. Plus, a lot of you in a Sydney Western Wanderers footy shirt and even one of you at a Thai boxing boot camp. Is this how you chill out?
I’m not doing martial arts at the moment but I have done it all my life so that has been a part of how I chill out. I love the discipline of martial arts and I find it quite calming and I stand by the principle of it – the strong defending the weak.
In terms of the Wanderers, I’m from Western Sydney and they are my football team. I love the Parramatta Eels as well and the Greater Western Giants in AFL.
Bird watching and wildlife watching is something I’ve developed over time. I find the process of finding birds and capturing them with photography very enjoyable. It’s time in their world and not your world.