The new president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions insists it was a difficult decision to nominate for the job, even given her almost 30-year involvement with unions representing textile, clothing and footwear workers. But for Michele O’Neil, 56, if there was ever the right time for a bigger stage, this is it.

“This moment in history, when winning change is so critical to the future of work and the future of working class people’s lives and their families and communities – if ever there was a moment to be part of that fight, this is the moment,” she says.

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O’Neil, the national secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union before its controversial merger with the CFMEU in March, brings her experience in an industry that has been at the forefront of globalisation and deregulation shocks and the exploitation of mainly migrant workers. She sees the same pressures in other workplaces that once seemed immune.

“It used to just be us, but now you see that sort of insecure work, sham contracting, removal of the ultimate employer from the worker who’s doing the work and any responsibility for their pay and conditions and treatment, exploitation, wage theft, non-payment of super.

“All the things that I’ve been fighting for many years in the TCF [textile clothing and footwear] industry are now really the norm for the majority of workers,” she said in an interview a few days before her election as president on Tuesday.

O’Neil is replacing Ged Kearney as president, who won the seat of Batman in Melbourne in March. The seat has been renamed Cooper. Sally McManus remains the ACTU secretary.

O’Neil’s ascension, assured after she received the support of leftwing unions, will thrust her into a higher profile role, but within the movement she is a well-regarded lifetime true believer. She didn’t think twice about joining a union when she had her first after-school job as a waitress in Canberra aged 14.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michele O’Neil has represented workers in the textile, clothing and footwear industry for almost 30 years. Photograph: Reuben Street

Her social justice passions began early, influenced by her parents and four older sisters, who took her to the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra when she was just 10 and to marches as a teenager to free Nelson Mandela from a South African jail. In recent years, she has been a critic of Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, slamming the major political parties’ “shameful bipartisan approach”.

O’Neil never attended university, and after school she threw herself into community activism, representing people she believed had no voice. She moved back to Melbourne from Canberra in her early 20s to head up the National Youth Coalition for Housing, which raised awareness and proposed solutions to youth homelessness.

In 1989, she took her first job with the Clothing and Allied Trades Union and the Amalgamated Footwear and Textile Union before their merger a few years later. It was a short-term contract and when it finished she got jobs in the industry – working a bank of knitting machines and sewing on labels on jumpers. She wanted to understand how to better represent people who worked in these jobs, but there was a practical reason – she needed a job. “I understood what it was like to be a low-paid worker. I’d been in plenty of low-paid, casual and insecure jobs pretty much my whole life.”

What she learned was while pay and conditions were essential, often it’s the little things that gave work dignity.

“The boss decided to turn off the hot water system in the middle of a cold Melbourne winter to save money. There was no hot water to wash your hands when you went to the bathroom and no hot water to use in the kitchen. Even though our pay was low and there was a whole range of conditions that you might think were the things that would be the top-line items, it was that one act of disrespect and lack of dignity for workers that hit people the hardest.”

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O’Neil often speaks of the little things. Her mother, Joan, now 93, left school at 13 to work in a tannery in Melbourne because her father had lost his job during the Depression. Decades later, when O’Neil was a child, Joan worked as a waitress at the Parliament House dining room in Canberra. “I remember really clearly her coming home and telling me how you could tell what sort of a person a politician was [by] how they treated the waiting staff. That stayed with me.”

She reflects on her own experiences of hospitality work through the modern #MeToo prism. Restaurant customers pinched her on the bottom and propositioned her, and a supervisor would take her into the storeroom and attempt to kiss her. She learned about the power of the group, or the collective, as she puts it. “Once I was finally brave enough to tell someone else what was happening, it was the union members and the union delegates in that workplace who stood up for me and made sure that I was safe. I realised really fast that I wasn’t alone.”



If it wasn’t for collective power, textile and clothing workers would never have won landmark charges in 2012 that meant that, whatever they were called or whether they worked in factories or at home, they would have the same minimum pay and conditions as employees. And it is collective power that O’Neil says will make the difference in the coming federal election.

Already, unions are running grassroots campaigns for the 28 July byelections and are pledging a bigger effort at the national level than they achieved in 2016. O’Neil knows the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, well – he headed the Australian Workers Union in Victoria when she led the state branch of the textiles union. “He’s someone who does understand unions and he does understand what’s happening for ordinary working people.”

The unions are comparing the looming election with its effective “Your Rights at Work” campaign against John Howard’s Work Choices in 2007. This time, “Change the Rules” is about something more, O’Neil says.

“[In 2007] it was very explicitly saying there is this clearly articulated set of industrial laws called Work Choices that are having this effect on people and we’re going to get rid of them.

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“What you’re seeing us doing now is saying there is a range of changes to industrial laws and rights that have reduced workers’ conditions and pay, but there’s also fundamental changes that have happened in terms of the economy. There are increasing disparities between the rich and the poor. We’re seeing businesses not paying tax and getting away with huge corporate tax avoidance; we’ve seen banks getting away with [illegal activities]. This time we’re explicitly campaigning for change, and we’re explicitly campaigning for something we’re trying to win, and what we’re trying to win is a fairer society.”

O’Neil praises McManus, the secretary of the ACTU, for articulating so well why change is essential. The distinction between the roles of the secretary and the president is at times unclear, with the secretary having an operational role, but also acting as the movement’s public face, which is part of the president’s responsibility.

“I’m confident that we’re going to be able to work out a delineation of roles and responsibilities that are to do with our different strengths,” O’Neil says. “Sally is a fantastic leader and campaigner and I’m very honoured to have her back.”

Coming to the job at this time, only months before an election, has focused O’Neil’s mind.

Asked what her first priority is, she says: “I am absolutely passionate about getting rid of the Turnbull government. Their attacks on ordinary working people and unions and their bias towards the big end of town, large corporations and the wealthy is something that Australia cannot afford and must change.”