Australian columnist Grace Collier seems to think I’m her kind of trade unionist. In a 31 October article, “Shop worker who shook the industrial relations world”, she writes that “For inspiration on how to craft a popular and effective reform agenda, the government should reflect on the case of Duncan Hart, a 23-year-old Coles employee and union member”.

Well, Grace, thanks but no thanks.

Of course, it is pleasing to see any newspaper report on my case, as it impacts on thousands of workers at Coles and has far broader implications for the retail industry and the practices of the Fair Work Commission. And it’s not every day that union militants and Socialist Alternative members get praised in Murdoch’s rabid rags.

In her article, Collier correctly points out that the national Coles workplace agreement is a horrific case of collusion between Coles and the retail union (the SDA). And she’s right to point to “top-down organising”, which is the bread and butter of unions like the SDA – and Bill Shorten’s AWU – as key to producing this outcome. As Collier says, “many unions unionise workplaces undemocratically, by ignoring workers and joining forces with management instead. The parties enter arrangements to benefit each other, at the expense of employees”.

But for Collier, criticism of the anti-worker practices of unions like the SDA is just a cute way of pursuing an anti-union agenda.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Collier is a classic union turncoat, who served a number of years as an organiser before moving on to the more lucrative “industrial relations” side of things for the bosses. In 2013, she received some public attention for attempting to entrap a manufacturing union organiser by secretly recording their conversation, on behalf of construction bosses in Melbourne.

You can see her real agenda when she claims that collusion between bosses and corrupt unions hurts “both workers and the free market” – as if the free market is ever anything but a disaster for workers’ rights.

Her central point is that, if the government wants to get anywhere with its IR agenda, it needs to “stop talking about unions” and instead “talk about workplace corruption and how its proposed policies are going to protect people from it”.

That’s a recognition of the fact that even though people are rightly fed up with lame duck and corrupt unions, there is very little support for the crude union-bashing rhetoric of the Abbott era. Collier thinks that “if the government wants its [IR] policies to receive widespread acceptance, it will have to grasp these nuances”.

Well, I’m not interested in how the government can make its reactionary anti-union agenda more popular – I’m fighting the SDA leadership because I want to see a union movement that regains its fighting spirit and organises workers to take on the bosses and the government.

 The only way to combat the top-down method of organising pursued by the SDA is bottom-up, rank and file activity. At present the SDA has little mobilising power and barely functions as a union as typically understood. Instead it relies on a racket it shares with large employers to jointly screw workers, from which it draws its influence in society, the Labor Party and thus the political system and the state. Its membership is largely derived from cosy agreements with big employers, maintained since 1971, which siphon off millions of dollars of members’ money to the bosses every year.

This kind of top-down and hierarchical union organising is antithetical to genuine collective organisation, which would empower workers to stand up for their rights through democratic involvement and decision making.

The SDA undermines real unionism. It does so not only through sell-out deals and locking out more militant unions such as the meatworkers. As well, the union’s outright refusal to organise its membership leads even the most basic ideas of unionism to wither. Few retail workers, even those who are nominally members of the SDA, would know the first thing about unionism, solidarity and the collective power that such a large organisation could wield.

We have seen the fruits of this in a union movement that continues to decline in coverage – reaching just 11 percent in the private sector, according to the latest from the Bureau of Statistics. This is at the same time as 45 percent of people surveyed reported a belief that workers would be better off “if unions were stronger”. This points to the absolute necessity of a rank and file orientation to unionism, both for unions to survive and to capitalise on that sentiment.

What workers need is not industrial relations “reform” from the likes of Collier. We need a return to basic union principles and rank and file organising. It is that, not the rejection of unions, which will secure our rights and advance them in the future.