“Without exaggeration, I haven’t slept properly now for two months,” the Australian Workers Union Port Kembla secretary said after the meeting.

“I was in the office at two o’clock this morning. Some people say ‘that’s your job’ but it is really stressful. I don’t show it much, I tend to have a bit of humour to keep me sane. But there hasn’t been much humour in this situation.

“It is hard. I can’t go through this again, I’ll end up in a box somewhere.”

Mr Phillips worked in the steelworks from 1979 until he was retrenched in 1982 and moved over to work with the union movement.

He said he was keenly aware that some of the conditions he was asking BlueScope workers to give up were the very same conditions he fought for more than 30 years ago.

“It’s been really hard to say we’ve got to give up some of that to maintain our industry,” he said.

“It’s not what we normally do. This is the hardest set of negotiations I’ve been to. We don’t go there and say ‘what can we give away?’. This is new territory for us but it’s the area we had to tread in.

“I’m convinced now we’ve got an industry here for a long time into the future.”

But he said he was not convinced when he arrived at the Fraternity Club for the vote on Thursday morning that the result would be good.

“I had a lot of concern and, to be quite honest, I thought it was going to go down this morning,” Mr Phillips said.

“I’m glad, I’m not happy, but I’m glad they made the decision that they have. People don’t like it – I don’t like it –  but we had to do what we had to do.”

Mr Phillips said Thursday’s Yes vote would also make a difference to everyone in the Illawarra.

“It means there’s still going to be $3 billion still floating around the economy here in the Illawarra,” he said.

“It means our unemployment rate won’t nearly double, which is what would happen if the steelworks shut.”