The PM called Sally McManus a giant of the Labor movement. Now she just wants to go birding

After 33 Years at the Front Lines of Australian Unionism, Sally McManus Is Hanging Up Her Shoes

Wanderstayfinder.com – The woman who once stood before a television studio audience and was met with jeers for suggesting that workers had every right to defy industrial laws she deemed unjust is now preparing to trade the roar of political arenas for the quiet rustle of bushland. Sally McManus, 55, will hand over the secretaryship of the Australian Council of Trade Unions at the close of this month, ending a stretch of public life that began in March 2017 and stretched across three federal governments, a global pandemic, and what she describes as an unbroken drumbeat of obligation.

“It’s been 33 years as a union official, 22 of them as a leader, and nine and a half as ACTU secretary. It never stops.”

Her announcement came alongside a parallel revelation: ACTU president Michele O’Neil would also step down from the top post. Together they formed what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese labelled “giants of the labour movement” — a description that carried particular weight because their pairing marked the first all-female leadership team in the council’s 99-year existence.

A Decade of Industrial Reorientation

McManus walked into the role under a storm of scepticism. That initial ABC interview, broadcast on election day itself, set the tone: she was shouted down for telling viewers that union members were justified in breaking what she called “unjust” industrial statutes. She adapted quickly to the volume level demanded by the position and spent nearly a decade pressing both government and employers toward a worker-protective agenda.

The legislative footprint of her tenure is substantial. Working alongside O’Neil, McManus helped drive campaigns for equal-pay protections across job categories, statutory rights allowing employees to disconnect after hours, criminal penalties for wage theft, and baseline guarantees — minimum pay, insurance coverage, workplace safety standards — for workers in the gig economy. Her years overlapped the Turnbull, Morrison, and Albanese administrations; the economic shock of the Covid-19 pandemic; Labor’s jobs-and-skills summit; a productivity roundtable convened by Treasurer Jim Chalmers roughly a year before her departure; and a prolonged period of public scrutiny over alleged corruption within individual unions.

Among the outcomes McManus counts as personal victories are sustained wage increases for low-paid workers, expanded support pathways for women and children navigating domestic violence, and strengthened funding and regulatory frameworks in early childhood education and aged care.

The Cost of Visibility

The same profile that amplified her policy work also made her a target. Since that first televised appearance, McManus has endured what she terms the “inner most horribleness” of critics — death threats, sustained tirades, and a volume of online abuse she says has escalated dramatically.

“I would say it has become 10 times, maybe 20 times, worse, and that’s got a lot to do with what happened with X and also just the continued monetisation of social media.”

She recalls an earlier era when platforms hosted communities of like-minded people without forcing participants into constant confrontation. That environment, she notes, no longer exists.

What Remains Unfinished

McManus is explicit that the work continues beyond her departure. She singles out artificial intelligence as a present threat to employee rights and argues the labour movement must engage more deeply with intergenerational equity and support for vulnerable populations. Having long championed tax reform in Australia, she frames these issues as inseparable from workplace policy.

She also flags the growing electoral traction of Pauline Hanson and One Nation as a priority concern, warning that should the party ever command power it would dismantle unfair dismissal protections. On the horizon of work itself, McManus considers a four-day working week not merely aspirational but realistic within a generation.

“If, in the end, AI becomes a wonderful thing and we don’t have to work as much because it’s replacing jobs, well, people still need to live and to participate in society. The way to do that is to cut working hours with no loss of pay … and that’s something that we could actually do in Australia.”

The CFMEU Question

No account of McManus’s final years at the helm would be complete without the shadow cast by the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union. She speaks plainly about a succession of CFMEU leaders who, in her assessment, abandoned union values across at least three states.

“Somewhere along the line, it’s hard to actually know when, the previous leaders of the CFMEU in at least three of the states completely walked away from union values and what was acceptable, for not just the majority, but 95% of unions.”

She credits that episode with sharpening the broader movement’s tolerance threshold: corruption and violence, she says, are lines that cannot be crossed. Victoria is now preparing to launch a royal commission into corruption linked to the state government’s Big Build infrastructure programme, expected to draw evidence concerning CFMEU activities.

“I don’t consider them unionists. I don’t consider them to have union values. It’s easy for people to be performative unionists, to wear the gear and to sometimes talk the talk. [It’s] that much harder to walk the walk.”

The Quiet After

For McManus herself, the answer to what follows is deceptively simple. After nearly four decades of organising, negotiating, testifying, and absorbing public hostility, she wants nothing more than a pair of binoculars, a trail map, and the particular silence that only open Australian bushland provides. The giant of the labour movement, as Albanese framed her, is ready to become, for a while, simply a woman watching birds.