The numbers are against unionists seeking to call the shots on policy.

THE name would appear to say it all: the Australian Labor Party. The ALP emerged as the political arm of the labour movement and its union affiliates are still an important source of money and organisational muscle. Times have changed, however, and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech last week to the ACTU conference delivered a blunt message to the union movement that it can no longer expect to call the shots when Labor is in government. In a week of several politically significant events, this one could mark the moment the Labor Party publicly shook off the shackles of its union origins.

Ms Gillard, who as Employment and Workplace Relations Minister bears the brunt of union disappointment with some of the Government's industrial relations policies, offered no concessions. She simply told delegates that "we stand at different vantage points". Labor's political and industrial wings may have worked together to oust the Howard government and its WorkChoices laws, but the Government would not go any further than the commitments it gave at the election. There would be no "second wave" of industrial relations reform, no giving in to a union push to scrap the detested industry watchdog, the Building and Construction Commission, nor to broaden the permissible range of industrial action to industry-wide pattern bargaining.

The result was the remarkable sight, unthinkable when the Rudd Government won power only 18 months ago, of ACTU delegates furiously heckling the second-most-senior Labor minister. ACTU president Sharan Burrow interrupted Ms Gillard's speech to ask that delegates show respect. Some union officials angrily warned that Labor cannot take their support for granted at the next election. Yet Ms Gillard and her colleagues are well aware that the union movement's options are limited  to which other party would they transfer their allegiance? To the Coalition, so chastened by the experience of WorkChoices and confused about where it now stands that precious few voters would even be able to name its IR spokesman, Michael Keenan. To the Greens, whose policies on climate change are anathema to the very unions most outraged by the ABCC's powers to police their industry?

Ms Gillard even alluded to the basic reason for unions' waning influence, numbers. And numbers are everything in politics. Only one in five Australian workers belongs to a union, and fewer than one in seven in the private sector. Even if every one of the 1.8 million union members' votes flowed to Labor in 2007, and they didn't, they would still have been outnumbered three to one by non-union Labor votes. Although union membership reversed a long-term trend by growing by 3 per cent last year, unions have a long way to go if they wish to increase their influence. The Rudd Government has made it easier for unions to win recruits and Ms Gillard was right in pointing out that unions need to work harder and organise to get workers to sign up.