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During the 1980s and 1990s, Australian labour attempted to restructure vocational education and training by linking skill development to wages through the award system. The author argues that, although unions provided the inspiration for the new system, the initiative had been lost by the early 1990s with the emergence of enterprise bargaining and the re-assertion of control by employer associations and state education bureaucracies and the subsequent creation of a new training market. The author situates this training reform in the wider program of economic modernisation and then considers training reform in three phases of union leadership through development, ebb and wane. The article draws on the experiences and reflections of several union officials who took part in the implementation of training reform policies and who were members of national tripartite committees and inquiries. An assessment of labour's experiment concludes the article.