Just when unions and their parliamentary champions in the ALP are mounting a campaign to protect weekend penalty rates comes a reminder of the old model of industrial relations: strikes, intimidation, and belligerence.
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Plainly, the umpire's recent ruling on Sunday penalties had fallen on the wrong side of public opinion, inviting unions, and former union-leading Labor leader Bill Shorten, to take up a worthy pursuit: wage protection for the poorest and most insecure workers.
After years of declining membership and the negative image problems wrought by thuggery and criminality on the nation's building sites, defending penalties is a popular cause central to the union project.
Enter the incoming ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, who frankly observed that unions will ignore industrial law when it suits them.
Shorten, who has never downplayed his union past, but knows the cost to his broad appeal, needs this frankness like a hole in his head.
Unsurprisingly, the government leapt on it as proof that Labor's workplace relations model is back-to-the-future. And further, to assert that with the ALP in thrall to its union paymasters, militancy would be Labor's new industrial reality.
"There's no way we will be doing that," McManus told Leigh Sales when quizzed on whether the peak body should disown the CFMEU after 118 findings of illegal industrial action.
"It might be illegal industrial action according to our current laws - and our current laws are wrong," she said.
The sharpest distillation of the political out-datedness of the McManus doctrine came from Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne, who branded it "anarcho-Marxist clap-trap".
Hyperbole aside, the best that could be said of it was it was an inconvenient truth. Politically inept might be closer to the mark.
Shorten moved quickly to distance himself, saying he did not agree with McManus on breaking laws, and that the best way to deal with unfair rules - such as those prohibiting strike action - was to toss out the Turnbull government.
The ACTU has since walked back from the comments, although not withdrawn them unconditionally.
But don't expect the government to settle for that. Malcolm Turnbull called it "outrageous" and immediately invoked respect for the rule of law as the basic prerequisite of leadership. It was a slam-dunk.
McManus had handed the PM an enormous stick.
Expect it to be swung with nauseating frequency at Bill Shorten when Parliament resumes next week.
