Departing ACTU president Sharan Burrow has blamed the Greens for the failure of the emissions trading scheme.

The party showed a “disturbing” lack of willingness to compromise, said Burrow, who was elected secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation over the weekend.

“Public policy is not something you start one day and the next day it’s finished,” she told The Age. “You’ve got to make a start; it’s incremental, and I found it quite disturbing the Greens, who are the party of the environment, couldn’t actually look to the future.”

She added: ”I would have thought that a price on carbon that you could ratchet up was exactly where we need to be environmentally and economically … Yet the Greens were hanging out, it seems, for a 25 per cent target, which they could have got over time and we would have been in the global game.”