Unions in Western Australia are campaigning in the Canning by-election, which will be held on 19 September.

The Build a Better Future campaign will be officially launched by Unions WA on 3 September. It involves hundreds of WA unionists fanning out across the seat of Canning to leaflet commuters at train stations and shopping centres and to knock on doors to urge people to vote against the Liberal candidate, former SAS officer Andrew Hastie.

Unionists will also make thousands of phone calls to spread the Unions WA message: “We’re not going to sit back while our jobs, rights and way of life are eroded by Tony Abbott’s destructive policies”.

The union campaign is a dress rehearsal for what will be a much bigger national campaign before the federal election. Thirty marginal seats are being targeted by the ACTU. Twenty-five full time staff are being appointed by state labour councils to run the campaign. Unions have already pledged $14 million to fund it. Messages are being sent to union activists around the country, inviting them to volunteer for this campaign.

The experiences with state election campaigns in Victoria and Queensland in the last 12 months and with the Your Rights at Work campaign at the 2007 federal election demonstrate that these roll-outs of union staff and volunteers can boost the Labor vote.

But converting trade unions into an electoral machine for the ALP will not turn around the decay in trade unions.

Since the 1980s, union coverage has collapsed from one in two to one in six of the workforce. Some strongholds have been decimated, and whole new sectors have emerged where trade unions lack even a toehold. Workplace union organisation has shrivelled in many places.

Unions have not been passive victims of government and employer attacks. Much of the retreat of the union movement has been the result of the decision taken by the unions during the Hawke and Keating Labor governments to abandon strikes in favour of lobbying government and appealing to the industrial tribunals.

This has been a disaster.

Although the Accord is long gone, the same reluctance to strike still dominates the thinking of many union leaders. But only strikes and serious attention to rebuilding local workplace structures – and the two usually go together – will turn things around for the workers’ movement.

What won’t help any is the uncritical adoption of the methods used by US trade unions – and this is what these election campaigns are – which have failed so dismally to do anything to arrest the decline of unionism in that country.

It’s not like getting Labor back into office is going to help the working class. We know this from the last time the party was in office – the Rudd and Gillard governments of 2007-13.

Workers’ rights? Rudd and Gillard rebranded the union-busting Australian Building and Construction Commission and introduced “Fair Work” anti-strike laws which are some of the toughest in the West. The cancer of casualisation continued unchecked in the name of “labour market flexibility”.

Education saved? The Gillard government planned to cut $2.3 billion from universities and delayed funding for the Gonski reforms for years.

A secure retirement? The Rudd government pushed up the retirement age for the first time since the age pension was introduced in 1909.

A fair go for all? Labor targeted single parents for cuts, and attacked asylum seekers, those with disabilities and the Indigenous population. The rich prospered while the poor fell behind.

With the current Labor leadership confirmed as dyed in the wool adherents of neoliberal economics, national security scaremongering and refugee bashing, there is no reason to expect that a Shorten government will be any better.

How will a Shorten government deliver on social welfare and public sector jobs when the party is committed to cutting company tax and boosting military spending?

How will asylum seekers, Muslims or others deemed enemies of the state find any relief from a party that backs every “national security” measure of the Abbott government?

And yet, despite this appalling track record, our unions are giving the ALP a blank cheque. Apart from a bit of lobbying around the edges, the union leaders are offering virtually unconditional support for the ALP.

We have never won our rights by becoming a cheer squad for the ALP, only by fighting. But there’s not a whiff of combativity in the ACTU’s plans.

The ACTU has done nothing to lead a real fight against the Abbott government. It sat out the whole of last year, when tens of thousands of people marched on the streets against Joe Hockey’s horror budget.

The only way we are going to build a better future is by rebuilding our trade unions at the grassroots. That is our only guarantee that we can defend our rights, whichever party is in office.