Unexpected accolade for ‘accidental’ unionist
Brunswick’s Caterina Cinanni is inducted into Victorian Honour Roll of Women
Mark Phillips
Friday, September 5, 2025
GROWING up in the northern suburbs of Melbourne as the oldest daughter of two migrant factory workers, Caterina Cinanni learnt the values of a fair go at an early age.
So it was not a totally unexpected step for her to pursue a career in the labour movement, rising to a senior position at one of the nation’s largest unions.
But never in her wildest dreams did Cinanni expect that her lifetime as a unionist would see her recognised as a “trailblazer” in the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.
Cinanni, who lives in Brunswick, said she was overwhelmed by the honour which was announced at a ceremony at the Arts Centre Melbourne on Tuesday night.
She was one of 24 inductees into the Honour Roll, which celebrates outstanding contributions made by Victorian women and acknowledges ways in which they make a lasting difference to the community.
She was inducted alongside a judge, academics, family violence campaigners, a nun, an ex-government minister and others, joining more than 770 women since the Honour Roll began in 2001.
Cinanni was nominated for her work at the United Workers Union advocating for better rights and conditions for vulnerable migrant workers, particularly women working in agriculture.
“It feels a little unreal at the moment, I really wasn’t expecting it,” Cinanni said.
“It is an honour … Normally, I don’t like talking about myself or my work, I do the job I do for the [union’s] members.”
Being a ‘trailblazer’ at the age of 54 “seems a bit strange”, she added.
“I’ve dedicated my life working for the union and for our members and I am a union organiser first and foremost. So part of that is actually about helping workers have a voice, empowering them to make a stand and actually fight for change and to help them organise and build the power to do that.
“So I suppose if a trailblazer is about building a path to making change in people’s lives, then I think the entire union movement probably deserves this award, not just me, because that’s what we do every day.”
Cinanni’s pathway into unionism was as a rank-and-file member and workplace delegate, which led to selection for the inaugural class of Organising Works, a training program run by the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
Among her fellow students in 1994 were the current secretary of the ACTU, Sally McManus and the former federal Labor leader, Bill Shorten.
Both of her parents, who migrated from Calabria in southern Italy before she was born, worked manual jobs their entire lives and were members of their union.
Cinanni’s mother was a piece worker for many years making clothes in the family’s garage before joining her father at the Australian Defence Apparel factory in Gaffney Street in Coburg, which employed more than 500 people in its heyday.
She vividly recalls sitting in the dark at night in the family car opposite the factory with her mother and siblings, waiting to pick up her father when he finished his shift.
In her late-teens and early-20s while she was at university, Cinanni was sometimes the family’s main income earner from her casual retail job when her father was out of work.
“When the factory shut down, my dad was unemployed for long periods of time, working in cash jobs. So I think some of the reasons that I’m working for the union is because I’ve seen and lived through what it means to live on the minimum wage.
“And for me, I think a lot of my frustration and a lot of my anger at how my parents were treated kind of drove me into making sure that one of the things I could do with my life was actually go to work in an organisation that did help my parents for a lot of their working life while they were working in the factories. And I wanted to do that for other migrant workers as well.”
Despite that upbringing, she said she became an “accidental unionist”, but once she started Organising Works her path became clear.
She joined the National Union of Workers as an organiser and has been an official there ever since, apart from periods with the ACTU and the Labor Party.
She was the first woman elected national president of the NUW in 2019 and is a vice president of the International Union of Food Workers.
Her current role is as the union’s farm sector executive director (it is now called the United Workers Union after a merger with United Voice six years ago) but Cinanni still considers herself an organiser above all else.
Along with other women she has encountered over the years in the union movement, Cinanni cites her mother and her nonna as major inspirations for having left their homeland and family to migrate to Australia and navigate all the opportunities and challenges that come with building a new life in a country very different from their own.
She took her mother along as her guest to the Honour Roll of Women ceremony on Tuesday night.
At UWU in recent years, Cinanni has led campaigning to improve working conditions and wages for migrant farm workers, including a landmark sexual harassment case in the Federal Court on behalf of seasonal workers from Pacific Islands who sued one of Australia’s largest fresh produce companies. They won a compensation payment in October last year.
Horticulture had been largely neglected by unions for many years and before Cinanni and the UWU began focusing on the sector, it was rife with exploitation, underpayments and unsafe working conditions.
Partly due to Cinanni’s team at UWU, there is now a minimum wage and guaranteed hours for Pacific workers in the farm sector.
They have also secured labour hire licensing in Victoria, national legislation preventing modern slavery, and new visa protections for all migrant workers.
“I think the award I’ve been nominated for recognises the work in this particular sector [agriculture] because it was a sector where it’s mainly migrant workers.
“People were being paid as low as $12 to $14 an hour in in one of the biggest industries in the food supply chain. And we’ve been able to organise workers to really fight back and win mass change in this sector … Twelve migrant women, 11 of them were seasonal workers coming from Vanuatu, lodged a sexual harassment case and fought that all the way to the Federal Court. So that’s the level of power we’ve built in the sector.”
Closer to home, Cinanni has campaigned for road safety in a notorious part of Nicholson and Albion streets, near where she lives.
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