Big employers do not drop a policy because someone asks nicely. They drop it when enough people make keeping it more trouble than letting it go.
That is what happened with Coles — and looking back, it remains one of the campaigns IWUA is proudest of.
The mandate put our members in an impossible position
At the time, Coles had a workplace vaccination mandate in place that put members who held genuine medical-freedom objections in an impossible position. For the conscientious objectors among our members, this was not an abstract policy debate. It was their job.
So IWUA led a public campaign, backed by thousands of fair-minded Australians, calling on Coles to drop the mandate.
Pressure works when it is relentless and personal
A campaign that fires once and stops is easy for a national retailer to wait out. This one did not stop. To achieve the outcome, we:
- Gathered thousands of signatures on a petition calling on Coles to drop its mandate.
- Sent Coles personal stories, daily, from real people affected by the policy.
- Encouraged the community to keep the pressure on via the #dropcoles hashtag on social media.
Daily was the word that mattered. Every day Coles kept the mandate, another member's story landed on its desk.
Coles dropped the mandate
The campaign worked. Coles ultimately dropped its COVID-19 vaccination mandate policy — a real win for our members, and for the many other Australians affected by similar workplace policies at the time.
The same fight played out one member at a time
Public campaigns get the attention. Individual cases get the results, and they were running alongside the Coles campaign the whole way through.
One IWUA member was a long-serving employee of the Government in Victoria. He had complied with the direction to be vaccinated, but on numerous occasions had explained his hesitation to upload his vaccine certificate to the workplace portal — because that workplace had suffered a privacy breach that was still under investigation.
The matter proceeded to the Fair Work Commission for conciliation. Conciliation failed, and the case was headed for arbitration. Before it got there, the employer, the case manager and the member negotiated a settlement: approximately $17,000 gross, a full statement of service, and the offer to resign rather than be reinstated.
What it says about standing together
Campaigns like this are a reminder of what IWUA members can achieve when they stand together. A single member asking Coles to reconsider changes nothing. Thousands of them, every day, with the whole country watching, changed a national policy.
We remain committed to advocating for our members on workplace and medical-freedom issues today.
