The 44-year-old working mother soon to lead the union movement
Melissa Donnelly, the new face of the country’s peak body for unions, has pledged to tackle cost of living while pushing for greater workplace flexibility, but says she will not support an unlimited right for every employee to work from home.
On Monday afternoon, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) executive appointed Donnelly as its secretary-elect, replacing Sally McManus who will step down on August 30 after a decade of leading the union movement.
Sydney-based Donnelly, who has been the national secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) for seven years, said in an interview with this masthead that her sights would be firmly set on ensuring wage growth kept up with inflation, but was more ambiguous on the recent scandals affecting the union movement.
“I know that workers, every time they go to Coles and Woolworths, [are finding] it costs more,” she said. “People are making decisions about whether their kids can go to an excursion or not, or when they get the new school shoes.”
But Donnelly would not go into detail on how she would handle some of the biggest challenges facing the movement including one of the biggest unions, the CFMEU, being put into administration following corruption scandals. Nor would she be drawn on the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) finding that United Firefighters Union secretary Peter Marshall had engaged in threatening and backroom misconduct.
Asked whether the union would cooperate with the Victorian Royal Commission into the CFMEU, and her views on the IBAC findings, Donnelly said she was not yet across the detail but that the union movement had “zero tolerance” for corruption and violence.
“That’s not going to change under my leadership,” she said. “Construction workers deserve a strong and clean union … and there’s more work to do. The administration is working towards those goals, but we need to ensure that the construction industry as a whole is free of corruption and violence as well.”
Professionally, Donnelly said her job was to “continue to address the real cost of living pressures that working people are facing every day”.
The OECD last month noted that Australians’ real wages have fallen by 5 per cent since early 2021, meaning price growth has outpaced pay rises over that time.
Donnelly, whose tenure begins on August 31, was the only person nominated for the secretary role and will be, at 44, one of the youngest secretaries of the council. Former ACTU leader Bill Kelty was 35 when he was appointed secretary in 1983.
McManus said Donnelly had strong, overwhelming support across all unions and represented “generational change” for the peak body.
“The average union member is a 44-year old working mother and so is Melissa,” McManus said. “She’s a year younger than I was when I took up the office. With two school aged children and having led a large union she well knows the pressures working people are under.”
Donnelly is also a member of the Labor Party, representing the Left faction on its national executive.
Asked how often she speaks with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Donnelly said she had a “range of dealings” with the government and government ministers and that conversations had generally been respectful.
During her time at the CPSU, Donnelly has overseen the reversal of the outsourcing of government advice and services to big consultancy firms, secured work from home rights and delivered eight weeks paid parental leave for both parents, according to the ACTU.
While Donnelly said flexible work would continue to be a priority for the union movement, she said there was not a “single answer” on workplace flexibility.
“What we achieved in the federal public service is not an unlimited right for every worker to work from home whenever they want,” she said. “There is a clear process and clear rights around how that can be requested, and what works for one worker, or for one workplace or industry, is going to be different. That’s why it’s really important we have a raft of options that allow employees flexibility.”
Figures from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner showed one in five employees at some federal government agencies worked remotely full-time in 2024 despite research broadly suggesting such practice can lead to worse mental health and worse productivity outcomes.
McManus warned last month that the new secretary would have to tackle issues such as the rise of One Nation and the far right, AI and billionaire influence in politics, along with the decades-long decline in union leadership.
The share of Australians holding union membership has fallen dramatically since the 1970s with only a small uptick in 2024, although the CPSU’s membership numbers have grown by 23 per cent over Donnelly’s tenure, in part reflecting an expansion in the public service.
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Millie Muroi is the economics writer at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age covering workplace and economics. She was formerly an economics correspondent based in Canberra’s Press Gallery and the banking writer based in Sydney.Connect via X or email.