It was supposed to be a line in the sand moment: the launch of the ACTU’s strategy for the future of the Australian labour movement. “Build a Better Future. Fight for Our Living Standards”, was unveiled at the peak union body’s triennial congress in 2015. 

Around 1,000 delegates heard speeches invoking the spirit of our union forebears and pressing the case that the trade union movement is at a critical juncture. “Delegates, the time has come again to take a stand”, urged president Ged Kearney.  

But the stirring words quickly gave way to the detail of the ACTU’s plan to recommit itself – with greater urgency and more resources – to the same dead end strategy that has dragged Australia’s union movement to the brink of extinction. It is a strategy that begins and ends with the election of a federal Labor government. 

“We are transforming the ACTU into a permanent campaigning organisation”, secretary Dave Oliver announced, as if revealing something new about ACTU strategy. “We will have unions campaigning on the ground and online in around 30 key marginal seats around the country.” And so it has. 

At a cost of more than $13 million (how much more, the ACTU isn’t making public) and under the stewardship of 25 newly hired full-time marginal seat campaign organisers, the union movement turned itself over to Labor as an electoral machine. 

One month out from election day – even before the campaign reached peak fervour – the ACTU claimed that 400,000 marginal seat voters have been called and thousands more door-knocked by unionists. An army of 20,000 volunteers has been marshalled. 

The campaign is described by its architects as “mobile and nimble”– management speak for “everywhere that the Liberals might drop a seat and nowhere that they won’t”. In a strategic shift from the 2007 Your Rights at Work Campaign, unions have made no attempt to force the issue of workers’ rights to the centre of national political debate. Build a Better Future has horizons no wider than the electoral boundaries of a few dozen suburban and regional seats. 

At a time when polls show the two major parties are on the nose, when people across the country see them as mirror images of each other, save a few tweaks, the union leadership again has tied our movement to the neoliberal ALP. 

We urgently need a union movement that wins back strength where it matters: in the workplace. We need to stem the membership collapse and rebuild our losses – not to build ever larger vote Labor phone banks at the next election – but because we need to fight for our living standards. The slogan makers at the ACTU are at least right about that.