Welcome to May Day, that annual occasion in which the abundance created by all history’s workers is acknowledged, the living labour of the many is upheld as the ongoing source of all value, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) writes an unreadable pamphlet.

Pamphlets have, of course, played a crucial role in the progress of organised labour. The truly mobilising document first places its worker at the centre of things, next locates their present conditions within a long history of injustice, and finally, having offered a brief but grand narrative of unequal social order, unites all readers with some upbeat promise about the loss of chains, etc.  

The pamphlet directly addressed to a hitherto powerless class takes instruction from drama. An author does not only understand the fatal flaw of history’s newest villain, but can describe it so well that the reader commits to felling that target. If a c-suite is shown by the pamphleteer to be entirely dependent on its workers and “therefore produces, above all … its own grave-diggers” then its fall, and so the victory of labourers, become to the reader not only possible conclusions, but inevitable, and fairly entertaining to read about.

The document generated by the ACTU is directly addressed to no one. Like a lot of “professional” written works, this was not produced to stir readers, or even to have them. It exists as a proof that someone has written something.

No one writes sentences like,” We also need to create genuine deterrents to stop employers from preventing workers from joining their unions and speaking up about shared concerns” or “ The laws to protect the interests of working people should include a provision like the one in the tax laws that has the effect of stopping employers from doing things for the purp … zzzz” expecting to be read. The Change the Rules document, which offers dreary respect to Agnes, Delia and other fictional workers named for the aunts of an ALP frontbench, is not a manifesto for change, but a bureaucratic obligation to the Change the Rules media campaign.

It has been a decade since the ACTU undertook advertising of comparable scale. The Your Rights at Work (YRAW) campaign, its history chronicled here in 2009 by future Secretary Sally McManus, did a fair job of explaining to many the source of newly emerged workplace uncertainty: the Howard government’s passage of WorkChoices. Even if it cannot be agreed this moment of industrial lunacy was “dead, buried and cremated” by the Rudd government elected to power in 2007, it is generally agreed that those Howard amendments to the Workplace Relations Act were keenly felt by Australian workers.

Opposition to WorkChoices was largely down to “the seriousness of the issue”. Even McManus, in her 2009 assessment of the campaign, concedes, “that you can’t just make these campaigns happen”. She’s speaking here of organisers and not the mass of Australian workers, only 15% of whom take up union membership, making ours one of the least unionised OECD nations.   

Still. McManus must be aware that the peak body she now leads was not the cause of widespread disdain for WorkChoices but merely an organisation that explained to many their real-life frustrations. The “seriousness of the issue” meant that the worker was “compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.” (That’s how you write a pamphlet. Well, if you wish it to be read.)

Unlike YRAW, a campaign that couldn’t just happen, Change the Rules is a campaign that may not happen at all. As much as one might broadly agree with McManus that insecure work is a social and economic blight, that employers have too much power etc, one might not agree that his or her organisation has a plan grand enough to fill a genuine pamphlet.

McManus has thus far spoken a great deal about arbitration and, past exhortation to break unjust laws notwithstanding, legal tweaks. She appears as adversarial and engaging as is the ACTU document few will read. In her Press Club address, she makes two claims with all the appeal to the young worker of a bonus paid in Jonas Brothers tickets. One is that “Labor rebuilt workplace rights after WorkChoices”. Another is, “since then the world has changed; changed in ways no one could have foreseen.”

The secretary’s undisguised partnership with the ALP is a problem. The secretary’s statement that the current crisis, of all capitalist crises, was unforeseeable, will be repugnant not only to readers of The Communist Manifesto, but anyone who saw The Big Short.

Many works have been written on the revival of a trade union movement truly deluded that it is deluding others with its technocratic speech. I’ve nothing much of value to add. I will say, though, that if all union officials were to read, write or otherwise contribute to a pamphlet that could not only be endured by ordinary people, but understood and enjoyed, that might be a nice start.

Union officials of the nation unite. You have nothing to lose but safe seat pre-selection. You have, if you care to truly address workers, a movement to win back. Give that a go.

Happy May Day.