I’m not much for memorabilia, but in my office is a signed cricket bat in a handsome presentation case. The inscription on it says “128 Not-In”.

I look at it sometimes and think about what it is that unions do. About what motivates members, delegates and officials. I’ve been looking at it regularly as a vicious, defamatory campaign has been rolled out against unionism.

The bat was presented to me by a group of union members, skilled refinery technicians working rotating 12 hours shifts. In October 2000, the petro-chemical company they worked for locked them out indefinitely. They walked back in the gate 128 days later. I was the union organiser, and we played a lot of picket line cricket that summer.

The dispute was a long, slow, battle of attrition in an outer suburb. Sporadic negotiations, a couple of court cases, the odd demo, and fundraising to support 130 odd families occupied our time. The only media interested in the dispute was the local paper. The only vaguely “political” thing that happened was when the local MP, a first-term opposition backbencher named Gillard, dropped in to talk to and support members and their families. The picket line was peaceful, and when the local coppers visited we would give them a feed if the BBQ was running.

The dispute was about things that mattered deeply to those members, it was about whether they had some control over their working lives. After months of failed negotiations over rosters, classifications and staffing levels, the company served lock out notices.

An internal email from a senior manager days before the lockout, which we discovered in a court case, still sticks in my mind. After a discussion of the importance of the company’s “values”, he said “there are a significant number of our technicians who must never be allowed to set foot in our plant again ... it is imperative that we develop a legal strategy to achieve this”.

That strategy was dramatic. During the lock-out, the company announced that it was conducting a “spill and fill” of all positions, and reducing the workforce by a third. The members were invited to re-apply for their own jobs while remaining locked out.

The cricket bat was the member’s way of saying thanks when the dispute was over. The bat, and the email, symbolises for me what unions do, and what it means if workers can’t organise. It’s a story about the imbalance of power between an individual worker and their employer. And it’s about the power of collective action to redress that imbalance and let workers be heard and their interests respected.

Workers' unions members rally outside the Queensland Parliament in Brisbane in October 2013. Photograph: /AAP Image/Dan Peled Photograph: AAP Image/Dan Peled

In economic terms, it’s pretty easy to summarise the two things that unions do: they redress the fundamental power imbalance between individuals and employers and they are a voice for workers with management.

Reducing the power-imbalance means workers get higher wages and better conditions than they otherwise would. Contrary to popular myth, people aren’t automatically paid what they’re worth. Australia has a significant “union wage premium” across key industries and occupations. Put simply, unionised workers do better. Part of this is that unions attempt to take wages out of competition between firms. This doesn’t mean firms shouldn’t compete. They should, but they should do it on the basis of skills, productivity, quality and innovation, and not on who can pay the lowest wages.

Through the Modern Award system, the minimum wage case run by the ACTU and enterprise bargaining, unions are directly involved in setting the wages and conditions of around 60% of Australian workers. Conditions that apply generally to employees, members or not, like paid leave entitlements, are a function of having unions strong enough to secure and maintain them as standard. Globally, a decline in unionisation tracks an increase in income inequality.

Secondly, the voice function. The evidence from here and overseas is that when management listens to workers it’s good for morale, co-operation, productivity, labour turnover, and safety. It has benefits for firms and workers. Organised workers have a different role in workplace consultation mechanisms than unorganised workers. The latter might be “at the table” but are powerless to make the boss listen.

In political-economy terms the effect of unions is also clear. Organised workers are a powerful constituency for public policy that benefits the community generally, policies like minimum wages, public healthcare, good schools, pensions and progressive taxation.

I’m lucky enough to have had most types of roles in Australian unions – I’ve been an organiser on the job, run negotiations and legal cases, and worked in a State Branch, a National Office and now at the ACTU. The fever-swamp rantings of the enemies of trade unions in politics, business and big slabs of the media don’t bear any resemblance to my experience of being a unionist. Not now, not ever.

My memories of nearly 20 years as a union official are about people. Of the members who gave me the cricket bat. Of the individual members I helped with grievances and of the workplace delegates who taught me a great deal. Of the Bosnian Muslim women who boned chickens, and whose industrial issues where how to avoid getting carpal tunnel syndrome in their wrists, and if they could get three consecutive days off to prepare and celebrate the Ramadan feast with their families.

And when I talk to my colleagues, it’s the same. Their memories and motivations are bound up together in the people they have worked with, and the communities they have worked for.

Tens of thousands of people gathered at the Domain for the Unions NSW major rally to promote fair workplace rights and better public services in Sydney, 2011. Photograph: /AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy Photograph: AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy

What we do as union officials, and delegates do as volunteers in workplaces, is the sometimes slow and often not very sexy work of helping workers get heard and get some power over their work, and therefore over their lives. It’s about supporting workers like these who are paid award minimum wages and have been told that they are stuck there because their employer has explicitly adopted a low-wage business model.

Our work is about people’s individual and collective right to dignity and fair treatment at work. It’s about decent wages and conditions, employment security and safety. And it’s about issues like patient care, and quality public services, and public safety, and rights at work for every Australian, union member or not.

This is important work. It’s good for working people, and it’s good for our community. Not that you hear much about it. Instead, we’re depicted as some sort of racket.

I’ve spoken regularly about my contempt for any crooks in the union movement, and am happy to put my personal record as an advocate for governance and accountability up against anybody’s. But the Royal Commission into unions needs to be called for what it is: the legal machinery to go with a general campaign to delegitimise unionism.

Nobody believes that the Abbott government wants to see bigger, stronger, more effective, better run unions as the outcome of that campaign. The government clearly wants the royal commission to function as a general trial of the fundamental validity of trade unionism, to both dirty us up and distract us along the way. Soon the government will start a productivity commission review of the industrial relations system, as a prelude to policy change. What better way to start a long-run campaign to reduce rights at work than to silence or discredit your only likely source of serious opposition?

The royal commissioner seems acutely aware he is operating in a hyper-partisan political context. Yesterday, in his opening remarks, he felt it necessary to make the extraordinary disclaimer that “the terms of reference do not assume it is desirable to abolish trade unions”. The Commissioner in the HIH Royal Commission, for example, did not feel the need to announce that his brief did not assume that insurance companies should be abolished. Such a comment would have seemed absurd in that context, but was deemed necessary here.

That he did feel it was necessary says a lot.

Of course if we did abolish trade unions, Australia would be a different place. A more unfair and a more unequal place, and one where most people would enjoy a lower standard of living. Because of what unions wouldn’t be doing anymore.