When Sally McManus was a skinny primary school kid in western Sydney, she was told she could no longer play soccer because it was only for the boys. McManus loved soccer and was good at it, and the 10-year-old tried to figure out what to do.

The following day, she arrived at school dressed in shorts, like the boys. She was too young to know what feminism was – she just hoped the teachers would let her play soccer. They didn’t, but swapping uniforms caused “a massive drama”, she says. “My parents weren’t happy, the school wasn’t happy, no one was happy.”

Talk to her friends, family and colleagues and they will tell you one thing about McManus, now 45: she has not really changed. The first female secretary of peak union body the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) identifies what she sees as wrong and resolves to do something about it.

At least since her university days, she has been a socialist, an active feminist, a brilliant campaigner, an intense, quietly spoken organiser with a clear sense of self. And just to let her enemies know who they are dealing with, McManus has a black belt in both taekwondo and kung fu.

This time, she is aiming to cause “massive drama”, with a broad agenda to “change the rules”, as the slogan goes, to convince Australians they are not helpless against a political and economic system she argues is failing them.

“This is the time for Sally McManus,” says Ged Kearney, the ACTU president and in effect McManus’s right-hand woman. “She hasn’t changed to meet the times. Finally, the times have caught up with Sally. She’s just perfectly in the right place at the right time, not only nationally, but globally.”

In March, McManus became the head of the ACTU after Dave Oliver unexpectedly resigned. As vice-president and head of campaigns, McManus was seen as a future leader, but few expected it would come so soon.

In January, McManus wasn’t thinking about leading the trade union movement at all. She was in Guyana in South America, four-wheel driving through the rainforests photographing birds. She takes “wild adventures” whenever she can and taking pictures of birds has become a serious hobby, her way to relax.

There’s little time for that now. She leads a movement in existential crisis, with record low membership – in the private sector, under 10% of workers are union members. McManus seeks to frame it differently, as the most vital political and social movement in the country, a key player in a historic era of transformation.

‘Prepare for McManusstan’

From her first television interview as secretary, when she said matter-of-factly that “I don’t think there’s a problem” with breaking unjust laws – the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, spluttered there was a “lunatic running the ACTU” – to her urging 1,100 people at a recent union conference to seize the moment, to embrace their role as the “great disrupters” of the status quo, McManus has been impossible to ignore.

Business leaders are unimpressed with her old-style capital-versus-labour rhetoric and what they say is her populist sloganeering. But they take her seriously. An industrial relations adviser wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week that business needed to counter her agenda or risk losing the ideas contest. Do something, or “prepare for McManusstan”, warned the print headline.

We’re going to change where the centre is ... If we win public opinion, we expect Labor to deliver on that Sally McManus

Critical to McManus’s outlook is that, yes, she wants Labor to veer left, to support greater government intervention in the economy – she favours the Scandinavian model of bigger government spending and greater corporate regulation – and to scrap workplace laws she says give too much power to employers, especially around casualisation of the workforce and union rights to take industrial action.

But business is right – her first goal is to win the ideas debate. She thinks long term, not only to help Labor get elected at the next election, but to forge a new consensus that can’t be undone by a change of government. Through that, she plans to rebuild the union movement. “We’re going to change where the centre is,” she says, to “join the dots”.

“If we win public opinion, we expect Labor to deliver on that.” She doesn’t think winning public opinion will prove that hard, no matter the conservative pushback. She reckons the public is ready for change.

She lists a series of issues she says some in the ALP don’t quite get and the public hasn’t quite connected. Forty per cent of people have “insecure” work, including 20% who are casuals. There’s been a big jump in underemployment – people who would love more work if they could find it. Inequality is at a 75-year high according to some measures, CEO pay has skyrocketed, while wage growth is at record lows.

Too many corporations use “wage theft” as a business model – she’s talking about scandals involving companies such as 7-Eleven, found to have systematically underpaid workers. And too many pay little or no corporate tax. Our industrial laws are among the most restrictive in the developed world, with employers having too much power in the pursuit of a “flexible” workforce.

The privatisation of essential services such as electricity and public transport did not deliver the cheaper prices and boosted competition that were promised. Trust in government is at record lows.

Some of these claims are contested, but McManus is not alone in insisting that joining the dots means concluding that so-called neoliberalism is in its death throes. Neoliberalism is an overused word, but refers to principles broadly accepted since the economic crisis of the 1970s. Since at least the 2008 global economic crisis, and more recently with yawning evidence of stagnant wages and growing inequality in many western countries, the “neoliberal consensus” has crumbled.

Sally McManus: ‘There’s too much power that’s gone to the top.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

It is no longer just old lefties arguing that untrammelled free markets, deregulation, the concentration of wealth, reduced government spending, privatisation and the crushing of unions may not be the key to economic growth and prosperity in the future.

In Australia, a strong social safety net remains and inequality is not as stark as in many countries in Europe and in the US. But the themes are familiar. The government’s budget mantra was “fairness”, with the centrepiece a big boost in education spending and a $6bn bank tax. The governor of the Reserve Bank says there’s a “crisis” in wage growth. The ground is shifting.

McManus sees herself as part of a global movement. “I absolutely do. We’re all talking the same language because we’re all dealing with the same problems, and that’s actually a hopeful thing. It’s easy for people to feel that it’s overwhelming, and that these people have so much power, inequality is getting worse, it’s inevitable.

“[Bernie] Sanders, [Jeremy] Corbyn, unionists like me all around the world think there’s going to be a convergence of our movements because it’s necessary, but also because conditions are creating it.”

McManus is like a modern-day nun. She’s married to the movement Jenna Price

To understand McManus, you need to grasp that that she is first and foremost a unionist, says Kearney. McManus “lives and breathes” unions, a movement that forged the Labor party in the 1890s. It remained a powerhouse even through the 1980s with the Labor-union accords which restrained wage growth in return for social benefits, including superannuation.

McManus has known no other full-time job other than working for unions. After completing an arts degree majoring in philosophy at Macquarie University, she joined the ACTU’s first trainee organising program in 1994 (among the intake was future Labor leader Bill Shorten).

“She’s actually like a modern-day nun,” says friend and journalist Jenna Price. “She’s married to the movement. I have not met anyone more single-minded in the pursuit of a cause than her, and that’s remarkable because women are so trained not to do that.”

Michael Flinn, who was McManus’ deputy for eight years when she headed the Australian Services Union in NSW, says that while she is an ALP member, Labor is secondary to the union movement. “I will give you my house if Sally ever becomes a politician,” he says. “I’m certain that she sees the job she’s doing now as the best job she could ever have in her whole life.”

‘I get heaps of crap on social media’

McManus bounds into her office in Queen Street in Melbourne, lean and full of energy. She’s in her usual uniform – dark trousers and a black jacket with a little “ACTU” pin attached. Her hair is short and beginning to grey at the temples. It’s a serious look, but there’s a hint of quirk. She wears cool lace-up flat shoes and bright checked socks, “a touch of colour”, she says with a self-deprecating smile.

She has never embraced a corporate look to fit in. In our first interview, she says she was “non-gender conforming from a very young age”, but she thinks she might have overstated it. “I probably don’t fit into your normal boxes, but I’ve really learned that the most important thing is to be yourself,” she says.

“Like a whole lot of other women, I get heaps of crap on social media ... and it will all be, ‘ugly lesbian’, all that stuff, and I’m not concerned with that.”

She recalls two incidents in her union-organising career, one at the beginning and one at the end, when she walked into meetings and got the reaction, ‘What? the union sent us a fucking girl to deal with this issue?’

“The workers ended up saying, ‘we don’t care Sally if you’ve got three heads and they’re all purple. The fact that you’re on our side and you’re effective at what you do is what we care about’. They were important lessons in strengthening your sense of self.”

No one is underestimating McManus’s challenge, but no one is underestimating McManus. Her pace is relentless. She has spent a lot of time in regional Queensland, where towns reel from job losses. Here she is at a rally in the central Queensland town of Tieri, where mining giant Glencore has locked out workers as part of a bitter industrial dispute over what the union claims is an attempt to reduce wages and conditions.

People can see a gap between how they thought life was meant to be in Australia and how it turned out to be Sally McManus

“You’re the number one poster child for working people in Australia fighting back against corporate greed,” she tells the crowd. There she is at dawn outside the Gladstone power station, railing against the company’s attempt to cancel an enterprise agreement, which unions say is a tactic to reduce pay. “The fact employers can even try this shows the rules are broken.”

McManus may be quietly spoken, but there is emotion behind her words. “I was in Townsville two weeks ago and talked to teachers. They have got huge problems now with crime. I hear mainstream press, conservative media, talking about the problem of ice, these terrible people who take ice.

“Well, actually, it’s the fact that young people have no hope. If my mum and my dad’s jobs are gone, well where is my future?

“People can see a gap between how they thought life was meant to be in Australia and how it turned out to be and they are angry and confused about it. People want an explanation for that [and] it will be filled by the likes of Pauline Hanson who will say, ‘the reason why your life is not as you expected it to be is because of immigrants’.

“You’ve other people saying, ‘it’s because we haven’t pursued trickle-down economics enough’. The story we’re telling is a different one ... the reason why there is that gap there is that there’s too much power that’s gone to the top.”

Sally McManus at the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ NexGen 2017 conference in Sydney. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

‘We did crazy things’



McManus can’t pinpoint when and why she became committed to social and political change, but she says it didn’t come from her family. Neither of her parents, John, a cabinet maker for NSW Railways and Angela, a clerical assistant, finished high school and her two younger brothers started work as tradesmen.

There was little talk of politics at the dinner table at their home in working class Carlingford, and “there would have only been a couple of books in our house”. She was already sensing class. When she trekked to the beach by public transport, the “westies” were often told to go home.

Younger brother Wayne says theirs was a thoroughly ordinary suburban upbringing in the 1980s, with sport on the weekends. Kids played outside and “only came home when the street lights came out”.

McManus was the first in her family to finish high school, and the first to go to university. Trish Doyle, now a NSW Labor MP, and Margaret Jones, then a 65-year-old mature aged student, met up with McManus in the university’s women’s room. They jumped into feminist campaigns under the umbrella of Pieces – People Initiated Eeducation Campaigns to Eliminate Sexism, targeting sexist advertising.

“We did crazy things,” says Doyle, “filling balloons with paint and trying to throw them on the advertising strip that the newsagents put out.”

Jones, now 90, remains a close friend to McManus, who visits her whenever she is in Sydney. Jones struggled with university at first, getting fail after fail on assignments. “I approached Sally, a kid really, for help and she was very gracious to me. She just struck me, she had a great sense of focus and firmness and quietness about her.”

McManus threw herself into student politics. As student union president in the early 1990s, she honed her negotiating skills, including with the university hierarchy. She took up environmental causes, eliminating plastic crockery and cutlery from the student cafeteria, introducing composting to campus and banning smoking from the student bar.

And her sense of injustice grew sharper, a way for her to frame the world. “It was quite a shock to meet all these private school kids, because I didn’t really know any ... and all of a sudden, you’d be going to some of their houses and it was a different world. And their entitlement was just a surprise.”

Before she joined the ACTU in 2015, McManus spent 21 years with the Australian Services Union, rising to lead the NSW and ACT branch. It was her tenacity and creativity in driving the equal wage case for 150,000 low-paid social and community workers, overwhelmingly women, that proved her skills.

The campaign took two years, and was a landmark in successfully arguing that these workers were so low paid because of gender discrimination – “women’s work” was undervalued. Numerous earlier attempts to make that argument had failed.

Sally McManus as head of the Australian Services Union in 2005. Photograph: The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

Again, McManus and others won their case first in the public arena. They held mass rallies, a national day of action. They danced in the streets and at parliament. Union membership soared.

McManus led strategic relationships with the Gillard government and the various state governments. She was unafraid to attack Labor when Gillard, who had supported the wage claim, began to baulk at the $4bn cost. Flinn says that there were some in the union who were prepared to compromise, but McManus refused.

‘’It goes to that deeper thing,” she said towards the end of 2010, “what does the Labor party stand for? If it doesn’t stand for equal pay, what on earth does it stand for?’’ Gillard came around.

There were sceptics when McManus moved to the national ACTU to head campaigns. She had spent so long with one union and had never played a national role. Kearney says Oliver had done a lot of the hard work in reshaping the ACTU and in handling the grind of the royal commission into union governance.

McManus arrived to “blow out the areas we knew we had to expand in – social media, data analysis, campaigners, organisers on the ground. That is her real talent”.

‘I think it’s classism’

Leaning against a wall in her office is a giant mock Medicare card, a memento of the “Mediscare” campaign McManus ran during the 2016 federal election, a distorted campaign, according to the Coalition, but an effective one. Around 5,000 volunteers campaigned in marginal seats, targeting voters in train stations, shopping malls and in their homes. She is promising a greater effort for the next election.

“I was only at 20% capacity, it’s going to be much bigger, I’m the secretary now,” she says. “We are going to bring to this particular fight a lot more and I’ve already got that mapped out in my head. We’ll also be much more on the front foot in terms of what we want … if Labor wins, there will be expectations from us.”

Again, this is about helping Labor, but it is really about building the union movement as a social and political force. “I want to be in a position where we have a permanent army of working people in their communities ... your teachers, nurses, community workers, your sparkies, all of them, working together through having their committees”.

She learned from the campaign of US Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. You need coordination from central office and smart use of new technologies and phone banks, but you have to allow local people to set their priorities and to run their own campaigns.

McManus’s relationship with Labor is evolving. She is not a small talker, not a schmoozer. She knows Shorten well, and he understands the union movement, but there are hints that some within Labor are unsure about how to read McManus. Is she too radical, too leftwing for the “sensible centre” needed for electoral victory? As for McManus, she has no doubt why the public is disillusioned with politicians.

“They see them as being corrupted by big money … and people will say, well what about our politicians? In the end, they go and work for the banks.

“Of course they [big businesses] are trying to influence our political system as much as they possibly can, and the only way to counter that is a kick-ass strong movement.”

At a regular formal meeting between Labor figures and the union movement earlier this year, McManus struck ALP attendees as very blunt, very forthright – which she is. Another source said that, while the meeting was cut short because McManus had to catch a plane, there was little tension.

Shorten has pledged more negotiations with union figures about how the industrial laws might be reformed, and has already promised to overturn recent penalty rate cuts if Labor wins the election.

Kearney puts it diplomatically. “There’s probably a wariness about [the direction under McManus]. If you want to be a major disruptor, it’s very hard if you want the political party to come with you. [Labor] is probably going to be thinking, ‘let’s have a think about this’.”

The former treasurer Wayne Swan spoke to the union conference in Sydney last month. He frames the bigger picture in a similar way to McManus, and has been doing so for several years. He urges Labor to be more forthright about its economic agenda, including rewriting industrial laws to boost the power of unions, in part as a bulwark against inequality. He has proposed that the ACTU should again have representation on the Reserve Bank board and unions should be on company boards, too.

“There is a hunger and an urgency about the left of politics having a much more aggressive agenda, which is far rawer and less nuanced than might have been appropriate in a past era where global capital was less aggressive and at least may have had a faint community interest,” Swan says.

“Where she’s really hitting the mark is that she’s identifying basically the brazenness of a corporate-type agenda that doesn’t think it has any responsibility to the community at all. That’s the environment she’s arrived in, it’s great to see someone out there telling it as they see it.”

The business community is watching McManus, reluctant for now to criticise her personally and wary of getting into a broad debate about neoliberalism. They will refute the details. The Australian Industry Group’s head of workplace relations, Stephen Smith, says “the unions keep saying that 40% of the workforce are in insecure work, which is just complete nonsense”. He points out – which is true – that the 20% of the workforce that is in casual work has not increased for 20 years, although it remains high by OECD standards.

Smith argues that independent contractors and self-employed owners of businesses, “truck drivers, electricians and so on” usually don’t want to be full-time employees. The world of work has changed, he says.

As for McManus’s call for a rewriting of labour laws, Smith points out it was the Labor government that introduced the Fair Work Act after the Howard government’s ill-fated WorkChoices. It has already shifted the balance too far towards union power, he says. Business wants laws changed, but in their favour.

“The unions are trying to argue that it’s unfair to them, but it’s an argument that is unsustainable. The laws do need to change, they need to reset the balance, but they don’t need to change to give more power to unions.”

This argument is live one, and McManus is probably right that, in the end, the public’s view will be decisive. Big business may be on the nose, but the union movement has image problems, too. McManus will not concede that some unions, such as the construction arm of the CFMEU, have damaged the movement’s claims to be honest worker champions, paying millions in fines for repeatedly breaking laws including blockading building sites.

Victorian CFMEU boss John Setka’s angry pledge at a rally earlier this year to target the families of building inspectors led to renewed calls for the union’s deregistration, and for Labor to cut it loose.

McManus is a contained person, but she bristles at criticism of the CFMEU. She points out that many of their actions are around safety on building sides – which is true, although far from all of them – and that what are now illegal actions once were legal. She insists the CFMEU is misunderstood.

“I know these guys. They’re all honest, hardworking, dedicated people,” she says. “Yes, a lot of them have rough edges. They’re building workers, they are tradies. I really hate this, and it does come from my background, the way that I heard people talk about people like my brothers who were tradies. Their language isn’t right, or the way that they said things. I think it’s classism. [It] doesn’t mean they’re saints because they’re not, but they are not trying to be anything but who they are, either.

“Unionist are the ones who handle workplace accidents. They are the ones who dig bodies out, and inform families. I’ve spoken to them afterwards, and it has an effect on you. Yes, they sound passionate, yes, they sound rough, but thank god for the CFMEU.”

Those within the union movement say Sally McManus has been a breath of fresh air because she, too, says exactly what she thinks. She speaks without equivocation, without weighing up first how people might use it against her. She doesn’t care what the conservative media says, either.

She’s a democratic socialist, she says, not a Marxist. She wants to change the rules within the system. As broken as it is, she believes in it, and is convinced it can be reformed.

As a university student she might have thought that capitalism had failed, that there was a need for “some big uprising”. She’s softened.

“I can see that could also very well lead to fascism,” she says. “There’s big dangers in that, and there’s no reason why our collective voice, our governments [can’t work] – they are our democracy.

“That should be adequate enough to tame corporate power.” She laughs. “I’m willing to try that for as long as possible.”