The election of Sally McManus to the position of Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary is not good news for the Coalition and Malcolm Turnbull.

Just as unions have been given the perfect fodder to run an anti-Work Choices style campaign – in the form of a surprise Sunday penalty rate cut in retail and hospitality awards by the Fair Work Commission – the ACTU is elevating its campaign director to the top job.

McManus, 45, will be elected unopposed at an ACTU executive meeting on Wednesday, the first female secretary of the peak body and one half of an all-female leadership team with the current president, Ged Kearney.

Her predecessor, Dave Oliver, built a $13m war chest for the Build a Better Future campaign around the 2016 federal election, which McManus used to boost Labor’s highly contested claim that the Turnbull government would “privatise Medicare”.

Tim Ayres, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union’s New South Wales secretary and leftwing powerbroker, describes his friend and ally as “relentless and ruthless” and says the ACTU “will pack a campaign punch” under her leadership.

“She is absolutely committed to making unions effective campaigning voices, not just in the election cycle but using every organising issue to mobilise Australian workers.”

McManus tells Guardian Australia the key to strong campaigns is that they are driven by the members upwards. “You’ve got to bring everything you can to a fight: not just legally, not just politically, not just in workplaces, but everywhere. You approach it at every level and bring every bit of capacity ... that’s the way I will approach campaigns as ACTU secretary.”



The union movement is in the fight of its life. Membership figures hit an all-time low in 2015, with just 14.4% of workers belonging to a union.

We’ve got to inspire a whole generation who are sick of so much wealth at the top Sally McManus

McManus says that effective campaigns can turn that around, pointing to a rise in membership during her time as the Australian Services Union’s New South Wales secretary from 10,000 to 12,000.

“The reason union membership has declined is due to the destruction of regular work, it’s in decline all around the world. Steady, secure jobs are being contracted out, outsourced, people are put on rolling contracts or forced to get ABN – all things that have taken power away from workers and made it much harder to organise.”

McManus, from the left faction, calls for stronger laws to stop casualisation of the workforce – specifically laws that give workers more power in the workplace.

Currently the Fair Work Act only allows collective bargaining in individual workplaces, forcing unions to negotiate one agreement at a time across many enterprises.

“Workers should be able to bargain collectively however they want to: across an industry, supply chain, or according to their occupation,” she says.

It’s an ambitious platform and it goes further than Labor’s current workplace relations policy. McManus says she won’t simply be negotiating behind closed doors for the changes but rather will build public pressure to force the parties to respond.

“We’re not aiming to fix the problem at one election but for a whole generation, and that’s not an easy task.”

When he ran unsuccessfully for the top job in 2015, former ACTU assistant secretary Tim Lyons warned the body was too focused on political campaigns at the expense of organising in workplaces. Elections measure the temperature of a society but the union movement needed to be like a thermostat that permanently changes it, Lyons wrote after Oliver defeated his challenge.

McManus’s vision responds to that critique by encompassing both goals: to win industrial power back in part through changing laws and to use campaigns to hold gains by changing opinions permanently.

McManus’s friend and former ASU assistant secretary in NSW Michael Flinn agrees that she builds “strong community connections” through campaigns “that don’t just rely on political wheeling and dealing, they come from the grassroots up”.

It is that approach that leads Ayres to credit McManus with running what he calls the greatest union campaign of the decade, the ASU’s equal pay campaign. Over five years McManus built a coalition to put equal pay provisions in the Fair Work Act and launched a test case that resulted in 150,000 community service workers winning pay rises of between 20 and 50%.

“It was more than a legislative win, the campaign built the case for change,” Ayres says. “Every politician wanted to be the first in the line to sign the ASU campaign pledge. That sort of momentum, whether in bargaining, or legislative processes or the [Fair Work] Commission is inescapable. Sally built the clear moral case for change.”

Another booster is Ros McLennan, the Queensland Council of Unions general secretary, who first met McManus three years ago while discussing a pilot penalty rates campaign in Townsville.

McLennan says she was was affectionately known as Field Marshall McManus during the 2016 federal election campaign. The pair drove between coastal towns in regional Queensland to meet delegates and build a campaign infrastructure.

“[McManus] wanted to get a feel for the country, to talk to people every minute of the day as we did things like get a bottle of water or fill the car up with petrol, to truly connect with workers in the area,” McLennan said.

“[McManus] is a really inclusive person ... She is one of the few I’ve ever met that treats union members the same as delegates, the same as organisers, the same as a national secretary. She’s a normal person, she doesn’t think she’s too good for others or have her head in clouds.”

McManus attended Carlingford high school in northwest Sydney then did a bachelor of arts majoring in philosophy at Macquarie University. She entered the union movement in the mid-1990s as a trainee in the organising works program and a youth representative on the ACTU executive. She served for a decade as the Australian Services Union’s NSW branch secretary from 2005 to 2015, when she moved to the ACTU campaign director role.

Wayne McManus, her younger brother, agrees that it is her ability to relate to people that makes her the best pick for the ACTU top job. “Everyone is equal to Sally, no matter what their race or sexuality or anything else, she treats everyone with respect,” he said.

That respect extends to the women McManus says were trailblazers leading the union movement before her, including the first female ACTU president, Jennie George, her successor, Sharan Burrow, and Kearney, and the many women who are rank and file leaders.

“I’m very proud to be the first female secretary of the ACTU ... But it’s not like I’m the first to ever hold a leadership position. At the moment 52% of union members are women, so it’s not surprising. I think people haven’t supported me because I’m a woman but because I’ll do a good job as secretary and be a leader for everyone.”

McManus has enormous goodwill from those she will lead. McLennan says: “Sally is a feminist, an activist, an organiser, a campaigner and a rockstar. All power to her arm.”

The first fight will be penalty rates and McManus notes that when parliament resumes next week politicians will have a chance to vote on a bill to reverse the Fair Work Commission cut.

“We will keep everyone accountable for their decision and keep campaigning until they do change the law [to protect penalty rates],” she says.

McManus praises small businesses who have vowed not to pass the cuts on and warns that “workers are consumers”, suggesting that workers could mobilise to avoid businesses that do pass them on. Her ACTU campaign team coordinated a boycott at Carlton United Breweries when the Electrical Trades Union and Australian Manufacturing Workers Union were locked in a dispute about outsourcing their jobs for less pay.

After months of pickets and workers and their allies eschewing the wrong brands, the unions claimed victory.

Her causes are as broad as the tactics she uses to win. McManus rattles off multinational tax avoidance and environmental destruction as key concerns of workers and young people.

McLennan recalls McManus’s support for Let Them Stay protests to stop baby Asha being deported to the Nauru detention centre, providing advice to Queensland unions and mobilising social media to help them sustain a 10 day vigil.

Above all, McManus promises to “take on corporate greed”, noting that the workplace relations system in general and unions in particular have been a key driver of wealth redistribution.

“If you don’t put limits on greed it just gets out of control. Things have gone too far and so we’re demanding power back for ordinary people.”

McManus says people understand that some have disproportionate power but “they throw their hands up, think it’s inevitable and can’t see how to change it”.

“We’ve got to inspire a whole generation who are sick of so much wealth at the top. The system is at breaking point, people don’t accept that it’s right and fair. I want to change all of that and build a movement that everyone who feels the same can join.”