Was Change the Rules a failure?
The peak union body spent millions on the 2019 election campaign, but we still have an anti-worker Coalition government
THE ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign caught the public imagination like none other since Your Rights at Work in 2007. Yet at the end of another federal election the union movement is no better off than it was before. What can be learnt from the experience?
Since last Saturday, the public self-examination and recriminations by the union movement have already begun. Just as most current union leaders would have boasted of their role if Labor had won, fingers are now pointed at the ACTU. Already, a review has now been announced into the ACTU’s election tactics and advertising.
Former ACTU assistant secretary Tim Lyons has criticised Change the Rules as a ‘vanity project’. Current union leaders have questioned whether too much has been invested in electoral politics, rather than into workplace organising.
ACTU secretary Sally McManus has defended the campaign, arguing that without it the result would have been far worse for Labor.
Yet the reality is that the ACTU is a collective, and while its president and secretary are elected, they are effectively the servants of the largest and most powerful unions. Historically, these unions have avoided sharing the responsibility for poor decisions — such as the withdrawal of on-the-ground campaigning resources after 2007 — and made the ACTU leadership the scapegoats.
No doubt this will happen again. A relatively new ACTU leadership pair of McManus and president Michele O’Neil still have reserves of political capital and they will survive the blame game, but it is fair to ask questions about the conduct of the Change the Rules campaign in the lead up to the election.
THERE was nothing particularly new, different or innovative about Change the Rules. It adopted a tried and true union template first used for Your Rights at Work.
In every federal election since, the peak union body has tried to replicate the success of Your Rights at Work, adopting a halo slogan and logo, and deploying a range of tactics including the ‘air war’ of TV, radio and newspaper advertising, the ‘ground war’ of grassroots campaigning in marginal seats, rallies and stunts.
As each election approaches, the inevitable stories will appear claiming the ACTU campaign will be the ‘biggest ever’. This rhetoric is intended to frighten conservatives, but it usually comes across as hubris and makes the union movement the subject of the story, rather than the policies it is trying to get adopted; at the same time feeding into the narrative of unions as just another big spending pressure group.
In 2018 and 2019, the Change the Rules campaign was fortunate to have a lot more money at its disposal than previous elections. Reportedly $25 million was raised through a permanent campaign levy which each affiliate is required to pay.
Once again the claim was made that it would be the biggest campaign ever. And perhaps it was. In addition to the usual tactics, it also had the most sophisticated online presence in union history.
The message from the union campaign never changes. It might start out sounding independent and worker-driven, but by election day it will inevitably have been boiled down to this: vote Labor and put the Coalition last. Any criticism of the ALP is put in the back pocket at election time, and to outsiders, the union movement looks like the campaigning wing of the Labor party.
But given that the campaign failed to shift votes in almost every seat it targeted, the question must be asked whether this type of electoral strategy by unions has had its day? Are union members sick of being told by strangers over the phone how they should vote? Are the hundreds of volunteers in union t-shirts sent to polling booths on election day wasting their time? Does doorknocking with a union agenda really change the way people vote?
Would the millions of dollars spent on electoral politics be put to better use by organising workers in their workplaces and educating them about politics through the traditional organising structures?
What worked
IF we set aside the disappointing result on election day, there are obvious aspects of the Change the Rules campaign which can be marked down as a success.
Most importantly, the ACTU has begun building a genuine social movement. This has been an ambition since the early part of this decade; in part it is a recognition that with declining membership density in workplaces, unions need to engage with the community and draw support from people who may not be paying members in the traditional sense.
To build a new movement, the campaign had to mobilise and activate both members and non-members. It would seem that the ACTU has begun to do this. The union base has been awoken, the union bogeyman stereotype has been broken, and young people and migrant workers are being attracted to the concept of unionism, often for the first time. This will put the movement in good stead for years to come.
Much of this is due to the force of personality of Sally McManus herself. She is not inherently charismatic, but her plain spoken determination and focus, and her refusal to back down to bullies from the conservative side of politics and business, has made her a labour movement hero in a short period of time. In less than three years in the job, she is the most recognisable ACTU leader since Greg Combet and Sharan Burrow more than a decade ago. For much of the post-Combet period, a perceived leadership vacuum at the ACTU allowed imposters like Paul Howes to assume the mantle of union spokesperson. But McManus is clearly now the spearhead of Australia’s labour movement.
Change the Rules also showed that unions should not be frightened of thinking big. They should not be ashamed of boldly advocating a different vision of Australia, even one that is in conflict with the centrism that often traps the Labor Party.
The other long term success of Change the Rules will be how it has redefined the public economic and industrial relations narrative away from the neo-liberal trickle down ideology that has been dominant for more than three decades.
This achievement should not be underestimated, because one of the biggest hurdles unions have faced for many years is being drowned out by an argument that the economy is best served by allowing business to have its way.
But now we have subjects such as economic inequality, wage stagnation, unfair bargaining rules, and insecure work well-established as part of the national dialogue, and this is mostly due to the success of Change the Rules.
Change the Rules has entrenched understanding of things such as wage theft and dodgy labour hire as being complicit in driving down living standards, and it has successfully painted business as the villains. Until the ACTU fell into line with the Labor Party in the latter part of the election campaign, it also reignited debate about Australia’s broken industrial relations system, including the hurdles which prevent genuine collective bargaining and the onerous restrictions on the right to strike.
And if nothing else, Change the Rules was a triumph because it forced the Coalition to abandon any proposals to further tilt Australia’s industrial relations landscape in favour of employers.
The Coalition went into the election with no industrial relations policy at all, apart from maintaining the status quo (which happens to be Labor’s Fair Work Act, with all its flaws). Consequently, it has no mandate to make changes now it has been re-elected. This will be important over the next three years, as the business/employer lobby is already agitating for further restrictions on bargaining.
What didn’t work
AS mentioned earlier, the Change the Rules campaign was a modification of the template first established by Your Rights at Work. It didn’t rewrite the playbook; it was simply bigger and louder than other campaigns since 2007.
In 2019, the ACTU was more ambitious than previous years. There were 16 target seats in the ACTU’s sights, and the numbers of its campaign staff ballooned, from those marginal seat co-ordinators to uni students earning a few extra bucks phoning undecided voters in the call centre.
But if the metric of success was winning seats, then it all came to very little.
The unpalatable truth is the swings against Labor on election day were strongest among the very people unions were trying to influence, predominantly male blue-collar workers in regional and traditionally working class suburban seats. Only three target seats were won — and two of them were nominally Labor after redistributions anyway.
Change the Rules never penetrated the public consciousness as had been hoped. Inside the union bubble, it was all that people talked about, but beyond the base it didn’t resonate.
Who knows what motivated how people voted but one thing is certain: they mostly weren’t thinking about industrial relations reform when the ballot papers were in front of them.
On election night television and in the following day’s newspapers, the union campaign barely got a mention either positive or negative.
This has led to criticism of the ACTU’s priorities, particularly whether it should have put so many eggs into the electoral basket at the expense of building worker power at the coal face. There are also legitimate questions being asked about whether the campaigning model of voter persuasion through phone calls, robocalls and doorknocking has run its course. This reflects an internal argument in the union movement that is as old as the Labor Party itself.
On the other hand, if your measure of success is things like capacity building in the union movement, then the assessment can be more generous.
In retrospect, one of the failings of Change the Rules was that it was too vague and amorphous, and too complex to explain.
What rules did unions want to change, and how? Unions also had difficulty explaining simply and succinctly how the current rules were conspiring to prevent workers from getting better outcomes.
Contrast this with Your Rights at Work, which had a clear goal: replacing the Howard government and abolishing its hated WorkChoices laws. When John Howard introduced WorkChoices with its Australian Workplace Agreements through which employers could instantly cut workers’ pay and conditions, unions were handed thousands of case studies they could use to show the damage the laws were doing.
But in 2019, it was much more difficult for unions to articulate how changing the government would lift people’s living standards, especially when the Morrison government was not proposing any radical workplace changes itself.
In 2019, the ACTU attempted to portray the cuts to Sunday penalty rates as the new WorkChoices. But the problem was that these cuts had been made by Labor’s Fair Work Commission, the independent industrial tribunal headed by a former ACTU assistant secretary — and they only impacted a discrete part of the workforce who were reliant on Awards.
AS for the rules that the ACTU and unions wanted to change, many of these involved arcane areas of law around collective bargaining — not easily explainable, and not relevant to the millions of workers not covered by enterprise agreements. To some, the changes put forward by the ACTU could even look a little like a grab for more union power.
The ACTU and unions were also hamstrung by the fact that the laws they wanted to change had been put in place by the party they were now urging their members to vote for: Labor. And guess who had been Workplace Relations Minister during a period of that Labor government? That’s right, Bill Shorten.
So even if the ACTU was able to define the problem through visceral examples of wage theft, for instance, it still had to convince union members that the solution was voting Labor. And to an electorate cynical about both of the major parties, this was always going to be a big ask.
Questions will also need to be asked about the populist messaging which underpinned the Change the Rules campaign. In short, it boiled down to all bosses are bastards, anyone with wealth is a thief, all the banks are crooked . . . big business . . . top end of town, blah, blah, blah . . .
This type of class warfare rhetoric might appeal to the union base and it may have been effective inside the echo chamber, but to millions of Australians it has the opposite impact. Most Australians believe success comes through hard work as well as opportunity. They are aspirational, they are proud of the jobs they do and who they work for. Many of them would consider their boss their friend. They want the big house, the shiny car and the other trappings of financial success.
Most of all, in an era of constant disruption, people want solutions, not more division. But the populist boss bashing rhetoric of Change the Rules may have scared middle Australians away and reinforced the stereotype of unions as a destructive force counter to the national economic interest. It may even have insulted their intelligence.
Perhaps someone with the gravitas of a Greg Combet could have made the rhetoric appeal to middle Australians. But the difference between Combet and Sally McManus was that by the time of Your Rights at Work, the former had deep wells of integrity and was universally respected after years of standing up for working people in major fights like the waterfront disputes, the collapse of Ansett, and James Hardie.
Was Change the Rules a failure?
CHANGE the Rules was a great slogan. It cut through and in three words it conveyed the idea that the system is stacked against working people, and the only way to overcome that is to change the system.
But a great slogan is not a campaign. The policies and intellectual underpinning of Change the Rules were sound; the failures were more in the tactical execution of the campaign.
With some adjustments, there is no reason to think that Change the Rules cannot continue to be the signature campaign of the union movement over the next few years. After all, there are other ways to improve the lives of working people than electoral politics.
And perhaps this is where the focus of Change the Rules needs to be for the next three years: building power in workplaces under the rules that currently exist so that next time we really can change them. Probably there needs to be a bit of both.
Under the guidance of Sally McManus, huge progress has been made in reinvigorating the union movement. The last thing we want to see is that go backwards in the next few years. But a key lesson from the disappointment of 2019 has to be that getting Labor governments elected is not the primary role of unions.
The rules may need to be changed, but a weak union movement that does not have workplace power and is dependent on friendly Labor governments will not be of much help to working people whatever the rules are.
The greater focus on electoral campaigning means that in the medium term, the danger is that the ACTU comes to be seen as a fringe lobby group without serious policy grunt, on the outer from major decision making and treated with disdain by both governments and business: a GetUp-lite.
Change the rules was a great slogan, but a slogan is not a campaign.
Meanwhile, if unions want to make a real difference at the next election, they need to perhaps spend more time talking to workers about why a just transition to renewable energy will be in their own interests.
And they need to spend more time listening to their members and other working people rather than just talking at them, telling them what to do.
THE reaction to the election loss of some in the labour movement has been telling. It ranges from blaming Clive Palmer, social media and the Murdoch press, to lashing out at those who did not vote Labor (especially Queenslanders) for being dumb.
Neither response is productive. Blaming the media for being pro-Coalition is like blaming the clouds for bringing rain. It has ever been thus, and it always will be. Buy a bigger umbrella.
Blaming voters for “not getting” the union agenda is even worse.
Unions — and indeed the entire progressive side of politics — need to listen to the people who did not vote Labor or Greens if they are to build a policy agenda which bridges both the challenges we face, such as the impending climate disaster, and the everyday concerns of families in the ‘burbs and regions. This is Union Organising 101.
Whether or not the Change the Rules agenda was correct, there was a failure to communicate it in a way that superseded people’s fears of change from electing a Labor government, particularly around tax.
This is a lesson for everyone in progressive politics, not only unions.
Whether genuine or artificial, those fears shouldn’t be dismissed. They need to be acknowledged and understood and a clearer case made for how change will be better for all of us.
There is more common ground than people realise but the hostile, toxic nature of contemporary politics makes it difficult for people to see that.
Listening to others and seeking to convince them isn’t centrism as long as you remain true to your values. But it’s a problem if your values aren’t right in the first place, or you just shift your values with the wind.
The uneasy fear that the disappointment of the Change the Rules campaign has exposed is that when the union base is so narrow — just over one in 10 workers —unions will have trouble reflecting and hearing the majority of workers. After all those one in 10 are hardly representative of the workforce as a whole, and it would be delusional to think otherwise.
This is an existential threat to the union movement, because if that decline cannot be stemmed, it will increasingly mean that unions are out of touch with mainstream workers.
On balance, the Change the Rules campaign gets a pass. But if the union movement is to have an impact in future elections, it will require a drastic change of tactics.
