Liam Byrne, No Power Greater: A History of Union Action in Australia, (2025) Melbourne University Publishing.
Can unions help workers become the dominant social force? This question may seem antiquated, if not completely irrelevant, given the historic decline of the union movement over the past few decades. However, it is worth remembering that, prior to this decline, unions readily accepted their historical role as the vanguard in the transition to socialism. In 1921, radical unionists successfully pushed the All-Australian Trade Union Congress (a precursor to the ACTU) and the ALP to adopt as their primary objectives ‘the socialisation of industry, production, distribution, and exchange’ (although the ALP immediately watered this down to exempt enterprises conducted in a ‘socially useful manner and without exploitation’). By 1927, the ACTU’s inaugural meeting endorsed the ‘socialisation objective’ without qualification. It is a grim irony that, despite a recent push to remove it, this grand ambition remains in both the ALP and ACTU constitutions. ‘The task of building democratic socialism’, stated the ALP at its 2023 National Conference, ‘is a co-operative process that requires…union action and ongoing action be organised by community groups’.
The story of the socialisation objective is indicative of the historic tensions between radical and reformist forces within the union movement. While the entrenchment of this objective in the fabric of the labour movement reflected the strength of radicalism, its subsequent degeneration into farce is a stark reminder of the power of reformist political forces, which, despite the best efforts of some radicals, have dominated the union movement, particularly since the 1980s. That Anthony Albanese is the first federal Labor leader to hail from the Socialist Left faction, which today holds the majority in the Labor caucus for the first time since the 1970s, shows the completeness of the radicals’ defeat.
The relationship between radicalism and reformism has long fascinated labour historians. And for good reason. The unusual development of Australian capitalism, in which employers were required to pay (with some notable exceptions) a ‘living wage’ pegged at a ‘fair and reasonable’ level, is a product of this dialectic. As noted in 1940 by Brian Fitzpatrick—arguably Australia’s most influential radical labour historian—the ALP’s rapid political success during the early twentieth century was closely tied to its unique capacity to mobilise ‘industrial workers under banners attractively splashed with socialist slogans for the task of Australian nation-building for others’ profits’. Unravelling the messiness of this reformist-radical tension has been a preoccupation of labour historians ever since.
It was in this spirit that, in 1976, radical historian Ian Turner reasoned that ‘the history of trade unionism involved more than just a study of how wageworkers organise themselves to improve their bargaining position on the labour market’. Pointing to the longstanding socialist objective of the labour movement, Turner concluded that the study of unions also ‘involves a consideration of the working class, class society, and class consciousness; and of whether trade unions, the “economic” organisations of the working class, of their nature transcend themselves’. Turner, along with many other intellectuals associated with the New Left, had his doubts about whether unions possessed this transcending quality.
More recently, in 1996, radical historian Tom Bramble argued that the demoralising experience of the Accords (1983‒1996) had confirmed these doubts. He argued that as ‘unions are institutions firmly located on the terrain of capitalism’ with close ties to ALP reformism, union officials are best understood as a ‘conservatizing layer which accepts the existing order and tends to restrain workers from militant struggles which might challenge it’. This theorisation, dominant among radicals following the rise of the Trotskyist left during the 1990s, coincided with an exodus of socialist radicals from union officialdom and, by extension, the ALP. The rise of the decidedly non-socialist Socialist Left faction, typified by Albanese’s small-target meekness, should be viewed in this context.
There has been a distinct lack of interest among labour historians in fleshing out or re-examining the radical critique of unions as an inherently conservative political force. Liam Byrne’s No Power Greater: A History of Union Action in Australia represents the logical endpoint of this tendency. In Byrne’s account, which begins in the mid-nineteenth century and ends in the present day, the struggle between radicalism and reformism is of little import. The socialisation objective is not mentioned. Instead, Byrne appears most interested in reviewing the history of Australian unionism through the lens of contemporary identity politics. ‘In this book’, he writes, ‘I have particularly sought to grapple with the manner in which unions have perpetuated exclusions based on race, gender and sexuality’. Class is presented as a ‘powerful identity’ that cannot be separated from ‘broader social realities and exclusions’.
To this end, No Power Greater features a number of fascinating examples of how, from the margins of the movement, marginalised identities pushed back against the social prejudices of predominantly white male union leaderships, thereby expanding what Byrne calls the ‘emotional community’ of unionism. Among the valuable contributions Byrne provides, the description of how union leaders resisted the demands of rank-and-file indigenous unionists for support—most notably North Australia Workers’ Union (NAWU) Secretary Paddy Carroll during the 1966 Gurindji strike at Wave Hill station and other subsequent strikes in the pastoral sector—is a particular highlight. Byrne’s detailed treatment of women unionists’ ongoing struggle for equal pay and the ambivalent responses they received from their leaders is also necessary reading.
That many of these marginalised rank-and-file unionists succeeded in breaking down, at least in part, the obstinate prejudices of their union leaderships is, for Byrne, a stirring vindication of the union movement’s enduring focus on mobilising workers to ‘assert their fundamental humanity against the dehumanising effects of the untrammelled labour market’. This ‘humanising mission’ is, for Byrne, a kind of North Star for the union movement: so long as marginalised identities within the union movement carry on this proud tradition of rank-and-file struggle, the ‘emotional community’ of unionism will inevitably expand to include them, thereby securing the union movement’s long-term survival.
Given the contemporary preoccupation with identity, it is not hard to see the general appeal of Byrne’s approach. In this sense, No Power Greater is a product of its time—a stark example of the decline of the Marxist theoretical frameworks Turner and Fitzpatrick saw as central to the discipline of labour history. Byrne, it must be emphasised, is not presenting his book as a radical study of union history, and No Power Greater’s disavowal of Marxist methodology is not altogether surprising for a popular history. What is surprising, however, is that Byrne appears to go out of his way to underplay, if not ignore, the complex history of radical-reformist tensions within the union movement.
Nowhere is this more apparent than during Byrne’s afore-mentioned account of the strike at Wave Hill station. Here, despite acknowledging the leading role of Communist Party of Australia (CPA) members in organising the strike, Byrne does not mention NAWU secretary Paddy Carroll’s well-documented reputation as a strident anti-communist. This omission is indicative of No Power Greater’s disengagement from the bruising internal struggles over what the union movement was—and ultimately could be. The result is that the broader ideological and historical context in which union action occurred is lost. While Byrne does recognise that following the Second World War an estimated 40 per cent of unionists were in a union with at least one CPA member on its national executive, he has very little to say about how this unprecedented organisation of radical forces influenced union action.
That socialists and communists were typically involved in supporting (or leading) rank-and-file struggles from the margins of the movement, often with some degree of organisational support from party headquarters, makes this omission particularly glaring. Indeed, for radical unionists, the struggle against the untrammelled labour market was more than a ‘humanising mission’—it also formed part of a broader strategic effort to replace reformist union leaderships that had long ago abandoned the socialisation objective. ‘The real fight’, wrote CPA General Secretary Lance Sharkey in 1942, ‘is obviously to end reformist control of the ACTU’. ‘With the ending of reformist control and the substitution of militant progressive leadership’, he continued, ‘the ACTU will be rapidly strengthened to become the most important directing centre of the trade unions’. This struggle between communist, reformist and anti-communist forces over leadership positions dominated internal union politics throughout the post-war period. No Power Greater, however,does not mention it.
As Byrne makes clear, any single-volume generalist history of the union movement will inevitably leave out many ‘important episodes, contributions, and themes’. However, Byrne’s decision to ignore the broader radical-reformist tensions seems less about limited space and more about giving his ‘emotional community’ and ‘humanising mission’ concepts—referred to as his ‘two core arguments’—room to breathe. The upshot is that, despite incorporating a number of fascinating episodes in which radical unionists played a leading role, Byrne effectively collapses this history of radical unionism into a broader narrative of bourgeois liberalism.
In this way, Byrne elides a deeper discussion of the underlying ideological and political forces that drive and shape union action. A corollary is that the rapid decline in union militancy over recent decades is not meaningfully examined. Indeed, the plummeting decline of union strike activity since the 1970s—the level of strike action is currently at record lows—is not mentioned. While Byrne reflects on the collapse of union membership from the 1990s onward, he does not consider how shifting power dynamics within the union movement contributed. Could it be that the decisive triumph of reformism over radicalism, best exemplified by the CPA’s long decline and eventual dissolution in 1991, contributed to the union movement’s degeneration? Byrne’s liberalist conceptual framework precludes such an examination.
Similarly, critical questions relating to the unions’ relationship with the parliamentary ALP are not asked. For example, why have ALP-affiliated unions, despite controlling 50 per cent of delegates at ALP National Conferences (60 per cent prior to 2003), failed to meaningfully challenge the ALP’s longstanding support for Australia’s draconian industrial legislation inhibiting strike action? Why is it that union leaders are able to hand over millions of dollars’ worth of union funds to the ALP, through both monetary and in-kind donations, without the explicit approval of their members? (In the 2025 election, the ACTU, of which Byrne has been a long-time employee, spent $1.366 million on social media ads alone, the second highest of any third-party organisation). And what does the ACTU’s full-throated support for the Albanese government’s 2024 decision to place the CFMEU (the country’s most militant union) into administration reveal about contemporary attitudes to union action?
Here, it is worth reflecting on a recent piece by Godfrey Moase, an executive director of the United Workers Union (UWU), which questioned the unions’ continued dependence on the ALP. (The UWU spent $484,479 on social media ads campaigning for the ALP during the recent election, the fourth most.) ‘Without a political-economic philosophy that gazes beyond the horizon of capitalism’, he wrote, ‘unions—their leaders especially—have come to accept the basic legitimacy of a legal, economic, and political status quo that is profoundly hostile to organized labo[u]r…as long as this remains the movement cannot return to viability’. In this sense, Byrne’s decision to subordinate the complex and storied history of union radicals gazing ‘beyond the horizon of capitalism’ is, whether conscious or not, a political act that can only reinforce the status quo.