Liam Byrne, No Power Greater: A History of Union Action in Australia Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2025.
As a labour law academic who has recently developed a strong interest in the history of labour regulation and policy in Australia, I have recently been exploring and enjoying the extensive and rich labour history literature. The publication of Liam Byrne’s excellent book No Power Greater: A History of Union Action in Australia is a timely and welcome addition to this literature.
Byrne’s book charts the course of union activism in Australia since the eight hour-day movement in 1856. His starting point is observing that as media coverage of unions has increased as the post-war economic and social consensus frays, ‘understanding of unions has not’. The questions which he sets out to answer to help address this lacuna in understanding are: What is a union? Who do unions include and who do they exclude? What motivates unions to take the actions they pursue? Are unions relevant to the twenty-first century, or are they a relic from a different age?
Byrne acknowledges that providing a definitive history of the union movement to answer these questions is an impossible task. Instead, his goal is to ‘illuminate what unionism means: why successive generations of working people have come together, founded unions, dedicated their time and committed their energies to these organisations, sustained and maintained them, and then have passed them on from one era to the next’.
Byrne makes two big arguments about this. The first is to emphasise the ‘humanising mission’ of unionism, that the struggle to resist the commodification of labour was also a struggle to assert the humanity of the working person. The second is that unions are more than institutions, in that they are ‘emotional communities, composed of people who have come together, struggled and sacrificed, and built a collective identity’.
I applaud Byrne’s emphasis on the humanism of trade unions at a time when parts of the world seem to be losing focus on humanity as a key policy concern. I can also see what Byrne is trying to highlight with the concept of emotional communities – to help illuminate and illustrate why workers have acted collectively over certain issues in history – and he maintains this as a strong theme throughout the book. But unions are more than just emotional communities. Their function as political communities has been widely analysed, but unions can also be social communities and economic communities – as exemplified by the role of unions in providing strike pay, or access to portable long service leave and other entitlements, or their historical role in providing insurance to their members. The emphasis on emotional communities perhaps detracts from this wider context, and underemphasises the role of unions in driving legal reform.
Putting aside these limitations, it is the middle section of the book (Chapters Six through Nine) which I found the most interesting, and where the emotional community theme makes its strongest contribution. These Chapters address a period which is perhaps underexplored in the history of trade unionism in Australia—the early 1950s through to the late 1970s—a time when unions opened up to a wider set of social and cultural communities, at times reluctantly. In addressing issues about which unions had for many years resisted change, if not been at the vanguard of racist and sexist exclusion, Byrne is not trying to sugar coat history. He acknowledges the sins of the past while endeavouring to emphasise the role of unions in achieving positive change.
In Chapters Six (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers and their fight against exclusion), Chapter 7, (Advocates and Activists—examining the transformation in the union movement over the period 1953 and 1969) and Eight (Challenging Racist Exclusion), Byrne acknowledges that in the 1960s and 1970s ‘Australia was forced to confront the legacies and ongoing realities of racism in a manner it had never done before’ (p 127). Byrne traces the role of unions in supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers’ struggle for equal pay as well as tracing the involvement of post-war European migrants in Australian unionism. One senses there is a much larger story to tell about both these issues. The history of regulation of Indigenous workers is generally underexplored. Nevertheless, it is commendable that Byrne tackles this subject matter. In relation to migrant workers, Byrne provides a strong ‘feel’ for the role that unionists such as George Zangalis played in supporting migrant workers through the union movement—support that at times was not available from government or other parts of society (p 132).
In Chapter Nine (Liberation and Revolution in the Labour Movement 1969-1979), Byrne traces the role of unions and unionists such as Zelda D’Aprano in the struggle for equal pay for women, including the three equal pay cases brought to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in 1969, 1972 and 1974. Importantly, Byrne acknowledges the limitations of these decisions, but notes their impact in ‘transforming attitudes within the emotional community of unionism’ (p 140), which helped to fuel the ongoing battle to implement equal pay.
I commend the book for its very readable expansion of the history of unions in Australia beyond their historically core constituencies. However, one final comment is to note that notwithstanding its expansive view of emotional communities, the book does limit its focus to core labour issues and concerns – wages, hours and so on. Perhaps Byrne’s next book – or a second edition – could include consideration of wider issues which have also been of concern to unions over history, such as access to employment, and social security in relation to periods of unemployment and in retirement, which have received less attention.
