Announcing their departures, Australian Council of Trade Union (ACTU) Secretary Sally McManus said she will step down first, at the end of August. President Michele O’Neil will stay on for a few months longer to help with the transition to a “new generation”.
Starting in 2017 and 2018 respectively, McManus and O’Neil were the longest serving ACTU leaders in more than half a century, and the first all-female leadership team. They worked closely with the Albanese government since its election in 2022 to bring in a suite of workplace law changes, from the right to disconnect from work to criminalising wage theft.
For most of the ACTU’s 99-year history, Australian men were more likely to be union members.
But in 2012 – just a few years before McManus and O’Neil took over – that changed. As of 2024, there were more women union members (around 853,000) than men (around 726,000). The Australian Nursing and Midwifery federation is the country’s biggest union today, representing around 356,000 nurses, midwives and care workers.
The single biggest challenge to McManus and O’Neil’s leadership over the years came from a powerful male-dominated union, the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU). In 2024, after mounting allegations of criminals infiltrating the union, the ACTU suspended the CFMEU’s membership.
The ACTU leaders faced criticism from both supporters and opponents of the CFMEU over that decision – and whether they should have acted sooner. It’s hard to say from the outside whether that’s true.
But that decision did come at a personal cost, with McManus revealing in 2024 she’d had to change her routine and live in different places due to security concerns.
In 2016, before McManus or O’Neil had taken over the ACTU leadership, 15.7% of Australian workers were union members, down from 21.7% just a decade earlier.
By 2024 – the last official count we have – 13.1% of workers were union members. That was a slight rise compared to 2022, when it hit a record low 12.5%.
A lot of the ACTU’s work under McManus and O’Neil has been on bringing in legislation to establish workplace rights, then getting those rights enforced, such as by the Fair Work Commission, the Fair Work Ombudsman or the courts.
The ACTU has helped push for a number of changes to improve the position of women in the workplace. These changes have helped to close the gender pay gap and to bring new workplace rights to women workers, such as the right to request flexible work and dispute fixed-term contracts.
McManus and O’Neil can retire knowing that they did a good job through a difficult decade – but there is still more to be done by their successors.
Source: After a decade leading the ACTU, what is the legacy of Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil?