Liam Byrne’s history of Australian union action hits the shelves

The Point has featured the work of ACTU historian Liam Byrne several times, and last year we alerted IEU members to the upcoming release of his much-anticipated history of union action in Australia, No Power Greater.

Well, it’s here!

Liam Byrne launches No Power Greater.

This powerful book is a timely reminder of the essential role unions have played in shaping modern Australia.

Byrne not only recounts the pioneering efforts to establish workers’ rights but also reflects on what unionism means today.

Drawing on compelling case studies of worker action and struggle, No Power Greater explores the lived realities of unionism – its challenges, its triumphs, and its ongoing impact on Australian society. It tells the story of rebellion, resilience, and solidarity, showing that unions are anything but history.

The book was launched at Trades Hall with speeches by Annie Butler from the ANMF, and Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil from the ACTU and a serenade of Solidarity Forever from The Trade Union choir and a packed house of well-wishers.

We encourage all IEU members to add this timely, readable, and essential book to their libraries. It also makes a tremendous gift for the union-curious in your life – colleagues, friends, or family who care about education, fairness, and collective action.

No Power Greater is available now from Melbourne University Press.

Liam Byrne’s speech from his book launch:

No Power Greater begins with the story of Ellen Cresswell, a Tailoress in the 1880s.

The Tailoresses of that period endured horrendous pay and working conditions.

They were subject to sexist stereotypes and undervaluation that restricted the work they could can access to, and facilitated their hyper-exploitation.

At a Royal Commission Ellen Cresswell gave testimony on her working life, and remarked that she and her fellow Tailoresses were made to feel like slaves.

But Tailoresses such as Ellen Cresswell, Helen Robertson, and other amazing women workers were not victims.

In December of 1882 they led a strike.

In the course of that strike they met right outside this building [Trades Hall].

At that meeting Ellen Cresswell moved a motion to form a new union – the Tailoresses Union.

The Tailoresses won that strike, busted those sexist myths, and asserted their place within the union movement.

It is impossible for me to come to this building and not to think of the Tailoresses, and the many generations of unionists since then who have organised, planned, strategized, and mobilised out of this very building.

Trades Hall have done a remarkable job in capturing and protecting this history – work that I know continues with its truly historic Heritage Application.

A few years ago I was talking to a union activist – a member of the mighty ANMF.

She was a nurse coming to the end of her career, and as tends to happen, we ended up chatting about history.

She spoke to me about her granddaughter who was about to enter the workforce and expressed concern that her granddaughter and her generation did not understand what unions are and what unions have achieved.

She asked me, is there a book I could recommend for her to read?

There are fantastic histories of individual unions and individual union struggles out there.

There have been amazing commemorations – such as the ANMF’s centenary commemorations last year.

There are incredible memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories.

But in terms of a book length general history of unionism, we have to go back more than 40 years.

Now, a lot has happened in the last 40 years.

But a lot has changed as well in terms of how we understand union history, how we understand unionism, and how we understand the nature of work and the working class.

I thought, if there isn’t a book like that I can recommend, why don’t I write one?

A book that aims to get to the heart of the human experience of unionism.

A book that seeks to understand what has inspired successive generations of working people to build, maintain, and pass on their own collective organisations – even amid all the extraordinary changes that have taken place in the workforce and the economy since unions were first formed.

In this book, I make two fundamental arguments.

The first, is that unions have remained relevant to workers because unions are driven by a fundamental humanising mission.

A drive to assert the fundamental right of working people to be treated as human beings: not as machines, or as numbers in a computing system.

The modern union movement traces its origins back to the new workers’ organisations of the 1850s.

That was a time when there were almost no regulations on work.

There was no minimum wage.

There was no workplace health and safety laws as we would understand it today.

Wages and conditions were determined by what employers said they could afford.

Workers complained that they felt dehumanised: they weren’t treated by employers as human beings, but as machines, or beasts of burden, or like slaves.

The origins of unionism can be found in workers banding together because they knew they had more power as a collective then they did alone.

And what did they seek with this power? Industrial rights and protections that ensured their fundamental humanity.

They were fighting for better industrial conditions – and the fundamental right to be human.

And we have seen this through all of union history.

Union campaigns to win rights that allow us to live decent, dignified, and well supported lives.

For our humanity to be recognised and valued.

This mission inspired the Tailoresses.

It inspired Stonemasons such as James Galloway to campaign for the 8-hour day in Sydney and Melbourne because they wanted the right to a life outside of work, and not to be forced to play “the mere part of machinery”.

It inspired Billy Trenwith of the Bootmakers Union to play a leading role in the creation of the world’s first compulsory legal minimum wage, here in Victoria, in the 1890s.

It inspired Muriel Heagney to campaign for six decades for equal pay.

It inspired a young Bob Hawke, who first came to prominence as the union movement’s advocate to the Arbitration Commission, arguing for pay rises for millions of workers.

It inspired Pat Clancy and Tom McDonald of the Building Workers’ Industrial Union as they campaigned to humanise the industry, and used their industrial strength to support workers in a weaker position to attain fundamental rights.

It inspired Laurie Carmichael of what is now the AMWU in campaigns to reduce the working week – recognising the dehumanising effects of manufacturing at that time.

And it can be seen with Bill Kelty’s remarkable leadership during the Accord period, in which unions won fundamental gains such as Medicare, industry and universal superannuation, and some of the highest minimum wages in the world.

There are so many others we could talk about.

The most painful part of writing this book was not what I included – but what I had to leave out.

The union movement is a movement of millions.

It is impossible to capture every contribution.

And so I hope this book will be seen as an entry point – a place to start to navigate this broad and rich history that our movement has, not as an attempted final word.

The second fundamental argument of the book is that unions are more than just institutions.

They are communities.

In the book I use the term emotional communities – communities of individual workers from a broad array of background and experiences who have forged a common bond, and a common identity, through collective struggle.

These emotional communities have been defined by who they included – but also who they excluded.

The first unions were founded in a colonial context.

They were organisations of white, male, skilled workers who used these organisations to protect their industrial position on the labour market.

Unions did not create the racism of British imperial dispossession and racial exclusion, nor the gendered stereotypes of the day.

But unions did often perpetuate these exclusions.

This is a reality of union history that should not be ignored or excused.

My book tells the story of how excluded workers took their own action to challenge the perpetuation of discrimination and won their place within the movement.

It brings unionists previously left out of so many historical accounts back to the centre of the union story – where they belong.

Unionists like Ellen Cresswell and the Tailoresses.

Unionists like Louisa Dunkley, Muriel Heagney, Zelda D’Aprano, who campaigned for equal pay.

Unionist pathbreakers such as Jennie George, Anna Booth, and Sharan Burrow.

Unionists like the Aboriginal activist and organiser Dexter Daniels, who pushed his union to campaign for wage equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers.

Unionists like Tommy Ewe, one of the brave Christmas Island workers who in their union’s strike against racist discrimination in 1979 was hospitalised while on hunger strike for the union cause.

Unionists such as Nguyet Nguyen.

Nguyet’s story is so remarkable that it spans two chapters in this book.

Nguyet began as an Outworker in 1987, just a month after arriving in Australia.

Outwork is work performed in the home. Usually organised by subcontractors or middlemen who take orders from fashion companies and distribute it out to outworkers.

This was a relationship designed for hyper-exploitation – as these large fashion companies sought to avoid costs of direct employment.

In her interview in the book Nguyet recalled working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, in addition to caring for her young family.

On one occasion Nguyet was shopping with her daughters at a clothing store.

One of her daughters recognised a piece that Nguyet had worked on.

It was retailing for $249.

Nguyet had been paid $6.

In 2007 Nguyet joined a pattern making course sponsored by the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union.

Nguyen joined the union and took action – visiting other outworkers to explain their rights and entitlements.

She bravely told her story to a Senate Inquiry into Outwork making the case for change

There is a beautiful story in the book of the National Secretary of the Union, Michele O’Neil, approaching Nguyet to work for the union in outworker outreach.

Nguyet helps other Outworkers to attain their rights and entitlements-and to find their own power.

This is a union story we should all be proud of – and it is one I am honoured to be able to tell.

The union movement is an emotional community, the bounds of which has expanded because of the agency and action of these excluded workers, and their allies and supporters within the union movement who put into action the principle of solidarity.

All of these stories are union stories.

The stories of union members.

The stories of the working people whose own collective action has fundamentally transformed Australia, time and again.

That is not just the story of our past – it is the story of our future.

We live in a time when the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet are finding new ways to disempower the rest of us.

To strip us of control over our lives.

It is not by accident over the last few decades that unions in Australia and across the world have been under sustained attack at the same time as we have seen growing inequality, social polarisation, and the rise of reactionary mobilisations.

This is because the wealthy and the powerful have learnt their history.

They know that the union movement will never stop fighting to protect our rights as workers.

To protect our fundamental, and our common, humanity.

That is the lesson they have learned from history.

This is why they have thrown everything at us that they can.

And it is a lesson for us as well.

That we are not powerless.

That we are not alone.

That we don’t have to accept what the rich and powerful tell us we must.

That there is a collective power we have to reshape our own world for the better.

A power that has made that change before.

A power that is making that change right now.

That is what the union movement is.

And in that struggle to claim our better future, and to assert our fundamental humanity – there can be no power greater.

You can purchase the book at all good bookstores or online at this link.