In February Wyndham City Council, in Melbourne’s west, sacked one of its parks and gardens workers. The council had employed a spy to orchestrate a frame-up and manufacture a reason to see him off. In October, the Fair Work Commission ordered that he get his job back.

News of the court case made it into the mainstream media. So too did reports of the obscene amount of money spent by the council on hiring a spy and then hiring lawyers to defend hiring a spy.

Left out of the story that most people heard was an account of what union members back at the council depot were doing about it all. Rob Monohan, delegate at Wyndham, was this year recognised as a joint Australian Services Union (Victorian and Tasmanian) delegate of the year because of his efforts organising action against the council.

Rob has worked at Wyndham for 23 years. He’s been a union delegate for 12. Rob started his working life as a member of the BLF and says he carried what he learnt about unionism then to his job at the council.

Over the years, Rob has built a solid reputation in his workplace and knows that he has the support of his workmates: “I’m just the button pusher. I can’t do what I do without the members behind me.”

In February, Rob arrived at work one day to be told by his manager to cancel whatever he had on. Management had lined up five separate meetings with union members to discuss “allegations of misconduct” against them. Rob sat through meeting after meeting in which outrageous accusations were thrown around and each worker was threatened with the sack.

Four of the five agreed to take a package, but one, Phil, had been at the council for 25 years and faced losing the most. He didn’t agree to a package and was promptly sacked. Rob said he knew they would have to fight to get him back. He went straight back to the depot workers to relay the outcome of the meetings. The union applied to the Fair Work Commission to dispute the sacking, but Rob knew that, if left to run its own course, the case could drag on endlessly. All the while Phil would be languishing without a job.

He also knew the depot workers had the industrial strength to put considerable pressure on the council. The first step was work bans. But when workers heard rumours that the council was planning to dock pay because of the bans, they decided to get in first. Rob describes the sentiment: “Fuck you. If we’re losing money, we’re shutting this joint down!”

A meeting was held, a vote was taken, and everyone walked out that night. The next day, they picketed from 8am. It was the most significant industrial action taken by Wyndham City Council workers in living memory. And it worked.

“By 1pm, we were summoned into Fair Work. So what we’d done had gotten the response we wanted.” The snap walkout had forced Fair Work to take notice and bring the case on sooner. Phil is now in the process of being reinstated with full back pay and all leave entitlements reimbursed.

Union coverage in the depot has risen from about 70 to 95 percent. At one stage, Rob said, they ran out of membership forms because people weren’t signing up online but were approaching union members directly to talk about joining.

Importantly, many of the new members are young people and women, two groups that the workers in the depot hadn’t been as successful at recruiting in the past.

Things in the depot haven’t been the same since, and Rob says that workers are pretty anxious since they discovered the length to which management will go to victimise individuals. He hopes things turn around and knows the strength of the union will be important in that.

Asked what the biggest lesson he’s learnt, he answered confidently, “Don’t trust management!”