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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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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