Socialist Alternative’s record of workplace organising
Working-class power is the solution to every problem. Knowing this simple fact—together with training in history, organising and political activism—gives Socialist Alternative members a head start turning workers’ enormous potential into a living, breathing reality. One demonstration of this is our track record in workplace organising.
I can’t provide a comprehensive list of the workplace organising and industrial disputes that our comrades have helped to lead in recent years. Such a list would be enormously long. For instance, at the start of 2025, we had comrades engaged in at least nine separate enterprise bargaining projects in Melbourne alone.
However, the following list highlights some of the more high-profile industrial disputes that comrades in Socialist Alternative have helped to lead over the past decade. It’s focused mainly on in-the-workplace organising, which has always been Socialist Alternative’s priority for union work. Workers’ power is in the workplace, so any organising effort must be concentrated here.
2015—Woolworths’ Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre. When management announced that labour hire would be introduced, our comrades helped lead a dramatic, legally unprotected four-day strike of 500 workers. The result was a solid win that kept labour hire out. We had to work hard to defend key delegates from victimisation following the strike.
2015—Melbourne Metro Rail. The first strike in eighteen years shut down Melbourne’s metropolitan rail network. An ad hoc rank-and-file committee that our comrade Kath Larkin helped to convene played an important role. Red Flag coverage included a train driver’s view, some detail on the demands, the Victorian Labor government’s appalling stance, and workers’ rejection of a sub-par deal.
2016—Polar Fresh Distribution Centre. A four-day strike of 600 workers at a Coles chilled distribution centre in Melbourne. Flying pickets were a feature of the dispute, which won a solid pay rise and a dramatic increase in job security. Red Flag featured an interview with our comrade Ryan Laws, the lead delegate. We published his reflections a year later about how the strike won better conditions for distribution centre workers as far away as Brisbane.
2017—1800-RESPECT phone line workers. This vital work had been done for many years by well-unionised workers based in a Sydney call centre. However, in 2016, the federal Liberal government started outsourcing the work to for-profit companies that paid rock-bottom wages. Our comrade Simone McDonnell and her workmates put up a terrific public fight. Despite these efforts, the campaign was defeated. Most of the work is now done by workers with significantly worse pay and conditions—and less access to support than previously. But this is one of few cases where workers in the social services sector have waged an active, high-profile public fight against the tidal wave of outsourcing and cuts that has rolled over the sector in recent years.
2017—Marriage equality. For the plebiscite on marriage equality, our comrades swung into action. We organised activities and discussions in workplaces, including warehouses, universities, rail stations, schools and construction sites. Standout examples include a supportive construction worker who organised a rainbow flag to fly from a construction crane in Melbourne and a badge-driven controversy at a Sydney Bunnings, which helped to build union strength and active opposition to bigotry in the workforce.
2018—Ipsos call centre. A bunch of comrades did some solid political and industrial work at this market research call centre in Melbourne, proving that young casual workers can be organised with the right approach. Regular “solidarity selfies” to show support for progressive political campaigns were important in cohering a solid base for the union, as was the industrial organising: who ever heard of a stop-work that won the right to read on paid time? Unionists from Ipsos went on to launch a short-lived rank-and-file zine, Strike Rate.
2018—Qube Ports. The workforce at Qube Logistics’ roll-on, roll-off facility at Webb Dock in the Port of Melbourne was the worst paid of any Qube workplace in the country. More than 80 percent of the workforce was casual, and there was a punishing work schedule. So it was a real achievement for a comrade, Andrew Martin, to play a leading role in this dispute, involving bans and six days of strike action. The dispute won mixed results but built a stronger presence in the workplace for the Maritime Union of Australia.
2018—Linfox Defence national warehousing network. “Workers can stop the war machine” is a nice slogan. Our comrade Cat Rose gave us a glimpse of what this could look like when she led industrial action at an outsourced logistics network that Linfox operates for the Australian army. The union at Linfox Defence had been weakened by accepting significant pay cuts without a fight during outsourcing. Cat built membership at her site from 10 percent to nearly 60 percent through patient organising around local grievances, which built a platform for protected industrial action over pay in late 2018.
2019—English language colleges. In the past, teaching English to incoming international students was done by staff employed by universities, working under well-established enterprise agreements. Nowadays, the sector is dominated by dodgy bosses paying rock-bottom wages. A comrade organised her workmates to win the first enterprise agreement in the industry in Melbourne and then worked with the Independent Education Union to launch a citywide organising drive. Unfortunately, this was cut short when the sector was blown apart by the pandemic in early 2020—though our comrades put up a fight where we could.
2020 onwards—COVID. Our comrades did an enormous amount of workplace organising, especially during the pandemic’s first years. We fought for safety in call centres and schools and produced detailed info on minimising the risks of transmission. We were part of the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism’s popular “pro-vax, pro-union, anti-fascist” campaign after a mob led by the far right trashed the CFMEU office in Melbourne.
Workers at a Sydney Bunnings, where our comrades had established themselves a few years previously, became national celebrities when a Red Flag article on their safety agitation went viral. Organising around COVID safety among the young workforce at the Melbourne removals company Man With A Van strengthened the union and flowed on to a successful agitation to win a new enterprise agreement in 2022. This Transport Workers Union EA guaranteed that wages would not fall behind the consumer price index—one of the very few EAs in the country to achieve this result as inflation took off.
2020—NTEU Fightback. When COVID threw the higher education sector into crisis, the leadership of the National Tertiary Education Union responded by attempting to cut their members’ wages by up to 15 percent. This appalling deal was defeated by the biggest national rank-and-file union rebellion in decades. The revolt was led by NTEU Fightback, in which Socialist Alternative members played leading roles. Our comrades’ regular email bulletins went to around 1,500 people and helped set an agenda in the union, helping to fuel record-breaking union branch meetings that rejected the deal.
Our comrades could play this role because of their painstaking prior organisation. Liam Ward had built a base in his school at RMIT years earlier by organising his fellow workers to win heaters and a water cooler. Alma Torlakovic had done the same over years at Sydney Uni, fighting and organising over everything from job cuts to the right for staff to have pot plants. Katie Wood at Melbourne Uni had also fought battles for libraries with books on shelves, helped organise small pickets which started to rebuild a weak union branch, and pushed the union to oppose large-scale job cuts. Most of this activity was unglamorous—but all of it built a base and established an orientation to worker organising that was essential to the success of the 2020 rebellion in the NTEU.
2021—Sydney rail. In this city-wide dispute, Central Station depot set the standard for member participation, holding strike rallies and regular members’ meetings. The fact that a couple of our comrades were based at Central (one being the train drivers’ union lead delegate there) was crucial to this.
2021—Perth Children’s Hospital. Seven-year-old Aishwarya Aswath died a tragic death at the PCH emergency department in April 2021, after being kept waiting for two hours despite her rapidly deteriorating condition. Nursing staff had repeatedly complained of short-staffing and overwork in the lead-up to this tragedy, but hospital management and the state Labor government put the blame solely on the workers.
A comrade working at the hospital helped organise a vigil in support of the family, which in turn encouraged the WA nurses’ union and the Australian Medical Association to call a snap rally at the hospital in May attended by more than 1,000 healthcare workers. This event fed into the strikes and rallies by WA nurses over pay and staffing over the next year and more.
2022—Knauf plasterboard, Port Melbourne. At 40 days, this was the longest strike by CFMEU members in Victoria in a long time. While the result fell short of the above-inflation pay guarantee that the workers were seeking, they retained a strong clause restricting labour hire and won extra payments for overtime and plenty more. And as our comrade Viraj Dissanayake told Red Flag after the dispute: “We showed one of the world’s biggest companies that they are not all-powerful”.
2022—NSW and WA nurses, Victorian teachers. Comrades in the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association played a leading role in getting a below-inflation pay settlement rejected at a mass meeting in late June. The vote for a higher claim was even more decisive when the vote was repeated at individual hospitals, especially where socialists and other active unionists were able to campaign.
Nurse comrades were part of a similar successful effort in Western Australia a few months later. And Victorian teacher comrades were a useful part of the agitation against the Victorian Labor government’s insulting 2 percent pay rise deal for school staff in 2022. Our comrades produced a widely circulated explainer on the deal, helping to win a “No” vote of nearly 40 percent.
2022-24—Enterprise bargaining in universities. Universities are among the biggest workplaces in most modern cities. After the success of the revolt led by NTEU Fightback in 2020, comrades argued for serious claims and mass strikes in the subsequent bargaining round.
Our small forces made a real impact at Sydney Uni, where our comrade Alma and her USyd Fightback team had to push hard in the union branch to schedule strikes. There were a record nine days of strike action, but these were spaced too far apart to withstand management’s main attacks.
At Melbourne Uni, one of the claims popularised by Fightback—for an 80 percent secure work ratio—helped to power the most serious industrial strike action ever taken by academic and professional staff at a university in Australia: one-week strikes in August and October 2023. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the forces to continue the industrial campaign when state office and management decided it was time to settle—though our comrades mounted a spirited rearguard defence.
Similarly at RMIT, the Victorian office of the NTEU killed the momentum of a promising industrial campaign. The result was a deal that included punishing teaching-only contracts for the first time at RMIT, though it did deliver a much tighter workload clause for teaching and research academics.
2023—Queensland Teachers Union. Comrades involved in Queensland Teacher Fightback won nearly 40 percent of the vote in union elections, building on our comrades’ consistent record of organising in schools and across the sector. This includes support for small-scale industrial action for refugee rights and climate action, and helping to coordinate large-scale opposition to the union’s acceptance of the inadequate 2019 enterprise agreement. In 2024, dozens of QTU branches voted up claims promoted by Fightback for the upcoming enterprise bargaining round.
2023—Mint My Desk. The world of retail and hospitality is full of cockroach capitalists who pay their workers under-award wages, in cash, with no super and no pay slips. Nationwide stationery chain Mint My Desk was one of these companies until our comrade Louisa McCarthy helped organise two four-hour strikes by the young women, many of them migrants, working at several Brisbane stores. The strikes, along with media attention and (eventually) intervention from the pathetically slow and feeble Fair Work Ombudsman, secured legal minimums for MMD workers nationally and won thousands of dollars in back pay for the workers who struck—as well as inspiring young workers around the country.
2023 onwards—Palestine. Since Israel’s genocidal onslaught on the Palestinian people reached a new pitch in October 2023, there has been only one workplace in the country where a majority of workers have voted to walk out on strike for Palestine and followed through. This was at Inner Melbourne Community Legal Service, where a legally unprotected strike and rally sparked hundreds of others to march in solidarity. Our comrade Louisa Bassini was central to this organising, which built on years spent creating an active union presence in Melbourne’s community legal centres.
The disgraceful lack of active solidarity shown by most unions in Australia, unwilling to challenge the Labor government over Israel’s genocide, has made it difficult to translate sentiment into meaningful action. Nevertheless, our comrades have kept up union activity on Palestine along with many others, focusing on the workplace: wearing keffiyehs and badges and organising fundraisers to spark discussions, encouraging workmates to attend protests and circulating open letters against management crackdowns on pro-Palestine free speech.
2024—Woolworths distribution centres. Our comrades around the country leapt into active support for the Woolworths warehouse strike before Christmas, the most dramatic display of workers’ power in Australia in 2024. Along with others in Victorian Socialists, we organised around 200 people to strengthen the pre-dawn picket line at Dandenong South when it was under threat in early December.
Importantly, we also took strike support into our workplaces, including rail, local council, school and university workforces, helping to rebuild union strength and promoting the idea that workers can and should strike to win. Some of the legendary worker organisers who built the strike at the Lineage cold store shed shared their stories and organising tips with Red Flag—and will do so at Marxism this year.
2024-25—Maurice Blackburn. Our comrade Colleen Bolger is one of the Australian Services Union delegates at this Melbourne-based law firm, helping build union strength over years. ASU members at MB took industrial action between December 2024 and March 2025. This started with small-scale actions such as a coordinated break, building up to short stop-works and then a ban on billing (that is, working without charging clients), which resulted in a lockout from management. The dispute has now concluded with an improved offer on pay and reproductive leave—having built a substantially stronger union and structure that has now been tested in battle.
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No other socialist group in Australia can compile anything like this list of rank-and-file workplace organising and industrial action in recent years. And to reiterate, this is only a partial list of some of our more visible workplace and union activity from the past decade.
We could extend the list by adding a 2013 campaign to save a Melbourne aged care centre from privatisation. We could add our comrades’ prominent role in the Australian Services Union campaign that shook an extra $1 billion in funding out of the Gillard government in 2012, to partly redress the gender pay gap in the community services sector. There’s also the flurry of motions in support of Palestine we helped coax through union channels in 2014 (although it must be said, this led to some useful discussions but little further action from those union bodies).
The list could be extended to include our comrades’ role in terminating “zombie agreements” struck under John Howard’s appalling WorkChoices legislation, which were still being used to undercut legal minimums years later at Grill’d burgers, Crust pizzas and Hog’s Breath Cafes. And there’s our comrade Duncan Hart’s participation in the historic Coles case of 2016, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to workers in retail and beyond.
We could list examples of strike support—from the docks to warehouses to education. We could include our comrade Bec Barrigos’ recent spirited public defence of the construction union against government-appointed dictatorial administration (earning her the ire of her Labor-aligned union leaders).
And we’d have to multiply the length of the list many times to record a lot of the stuff that is crucial, but which necessarily ends up having the lowest profile. In some modern, atomised workplaces, the first challenge is creating a way to engage with our fellow workers at all. Then there’s establishing ourselves as the political people in a workplace through discussions, sharing articles, offering a socialist newspaper or getting workmates to an event—all of which are important in their own right and can start to build a core team for industrial organising.
There are the hours spent slogging through the crucial fine print awards and enterprise agreements so we don’t get ripped off or misled. And then there’s the art of working out a collective, semi-public way to go through whatever feeble “proper channels” are available—to get a result, lift the self-confidence of the workers involved and provide a public example for others to follow. Most of this will never be recorded in the history books, but all of it is crucial.
No-one can jump over the circumstances we find ourselves in by some effort of will. Plenty of workplace organising efforts will get to a certain point before being ground down by management pressure or an unsupportive union hierarchy or the curse of low expectations among workmates, which we can’t always manage to shift with small forces.
But even in these cases, we often manage to shake things up a little, lift the expectations of a minority of active union members, and share an experience of workplace organising. All of this is important for the long term. And depending on the circumstances in a particular workplace and our ability to build an organising team among our fellow workers, our efforts can succeed in making a bit of history.
Thousands of workers have benefited from the higher wages and better conditions won in disputes we’ve been part of. But our commitment to workplace organising isn’t solely because good organising and well-supported strikes are the most effective way for workers to win and keep our gains. We also take workplace organising seriously because of the effect this can have on the workers who participate in it.
Every instance of a worker standing an inch taller on a picket line—because they are demonstrating in practice that they are more powerful than the boss—is a long-term contribution to building our side’s forces. And it’s a small down payment on the sort of society that socialists are fighting for: one based on solidarity and workers’ collective strength, rather than the dog-eat-dog divide and rule of capitalism.
The connection between these two things—our industrial work and the socialist future we’re fighting for—is important. Even the best trade union work will never get us to socialism. But it can play a crucial role.
In more politicised and tumultuous times, quite small revolutionary groups have been able to make a considerable impact on the class struggle—and to build serious forces. In Australia, the three great union revivals of the twentieth century were fundamentally intertwined with a rebirth of radical and revolutionary political currents. The “rank-and-file strategy” pursued by the Socialist Workers Party in the UK and the International Socialists in the US in the late 1960s and early 70s are also useful examples for study. This sort of large-scale organising lies ahead of us.
We’re proud of our union work’s contribution to the class struggle. We’ve helped to win better conditions, sparked political discussion, and given many workers a taste of our side’s collective power. We see this activity as an important part of an even bigger project—the building of a revolutionary socialist party and our collective fight for a socialist future.
Jerome Small is a member of Socialist Alternative’s workers organising committee. He will speak at the session Inside the organising: stories from the union frontline at the Marxism Conference 2025, 17-20 April.
