As the Queensland votes roll in tomorrow night, trade union pineapple heads will no doubt have a stern eye on the outcome, hopeful that a narrow ALP victory may keep alive their dreams to one day ascend to the lofty heights of state parliament.

But John Cosgrove, the boss of the Queensland branch of the National Union of Workers, will have another crucial poll stoush on his mind. Voting is reaching fever pitch in the NUW National Office’s controversial plans to close every state branch of the union, bar NSW and Victoria, effectively abolishing Cosgrove’s job, as foreshadowed in Crikey in October.

The postal vote will be counted at the Australian Electoral Commission’s Melbourne offices at 10am on Monday with rival officials converging on AEC HQ to carefully scrutinise the outcome. Feedback gleaned from NUW sources in Victoria and NSW suggest the vote will be a squeaker, with last minute sh-t sheets and phone calls from both sides urging members to vote early and vote often. NUW national call centre staff have been enlisted to get out the “yes” vote with Ministerial staffers from NUW-aligned Victorian MPs Tim Holding and Martin Pakula also said to be frantically hitting the phones.

For their part, the states have launched an extraordinarily aggressive website to save their hides with regular postings accusing the National Office of trying to mask the Victorian branch’s failure to retain members (said to have declined by 2000 last year) and balance the books by drawing on the resources of other states to act as a temporary buffer. The Victorian and national organisations are virtually joined at the hip, with the vast majority of NUW members sourced from Victoria and the two wings sharing office bearers over the years.

The amalgamation push has come from a group of Victorian “young turks”, led by NUW General Secretary and Victorian ALP President Charlie Donnelly. His so-called “ambition faction” has claimed that the creation of a merged “General Branch” is the only way forward to ensure a sustainable organisation amid a shrinking manufacturing sector and an eroding membership base. But the Turks have met strident opposition from the state secretaries with an original ballot planned for mid-October delayed after an unsuccessful High Court challenge.

In the eyes of the other states, Donnelly and loyal lieutenant Antony Thow are prosecuting a naked power grab, claiming that the takeover not only impinges on effective representation, but also featherbeds Donnelly and Thow’s push to follow former State Secretary Pakula’s path to the Victorian upper house. In Victoria, the NUW have lost their grip on ALP pre-selection power after January’s left-right ALP “stability pact” effectively excluded the so-called networkers from the usual divvying up of seats.

But perhaps the most interesting debate centres on the NUW’s gleaming new national HQ in Melbourne’s Docklands. If the “no” vote gets up, the $6.7 million purchase (at least, some sources say it cost up to $30 million) could become a white elephant, leading to claims the original edifice was purchased to blackmail the rest of the states into accepting the merger. In an interesting twist, the old NUW building in North Melbourne was one of the final dubious purchases of stricken financial services conglomerate Storm Financial, with $6.75 million still owed to the NUW now under the control of Storm’s administrators.

In one of the states’ more tenuous outbursts, the dissident secretaries come close to claiming Donnelly was complicit in the infamous sacking of 2,000 Pacific Brands workers, because PacBrands HR manager Ted Eftimiadis serves on the NUW-helmed LUCRF superannuation board. Former NUW General Secretary and National ALP President Greg Sword was dispatched to run LUCRF after he was rolled by Donnelly and Pakula in 2004. In Queensland, rumours have been circulating that EBA negotiations at Pacific Brands sites have stalled because the firm has failed to recognise the Queensland branch in the lead-up to the vote.

The cost of the ballot is also under attack, with the AEC postal vote process said to have cost around $100,000 to administer, placing further strain on the NUW’s bottom line. The AEC has been in turn accused of failing to send out ballot papers with around 500-800 NSW members only receiving them yesterday, leaving precious little time to return them to Melbourne before the Monday morning deadline.

The NUW has a history of previous mergers and consolidations, with the union itself an amalgam of a bevy of smaller unions, including Simon Crean’s Storeman and Packers. Nevertheless, the dissident secretaries’ claims should be treated with skepticism — if Thow and Donnelly are guilty of feathering their own beds, than the same might be said of their state-based counterparts.

The ACTU has repeatedly identified that one of the barriers to trade union revitalisation are excessive layers of officials who, owing to Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy, fear being returned to the shop floor from whence they came. In fact, ACTU strategists have specifically fingered intransigent state branches as the most substantial barriers to reform. Significant trade union membership growth in the US has been achieved not through additional layers of bureaucracy but through an already-existing network of autonomous “locals”.

But in other ways, the consolidation push seems questionable. Instead of investing serious resources in grass-roots organising, and building links between community groups to respond to the crisis, the NUW has basically assumed a defensive posture in a vain attempt to preserve the status-quo.

And with the domestic manufacturing sector tanking, the future for both the NUW and the traditional labour movement in general is likely to remain grim indeed, whether or not the “young turks” end up getting their way on Monday.