Performance appraisal is frequently seen as one of the hallmarks of the ‘new managerialism’ in public sector human resource management. It is also commonly represented as a device for individualizing the employment relationship. Yet even appraisal offers scope for employee voice/participation, both individually and collectively, and for varying degrees of management–union cooperation. This study examines an unlikely case of management–union partnership in performance appraisal – that applied since 2000 to teachers in Australia's largest public schooling bureaucracy, the NSW Department of Education and Training, whose teachers have a long history of union solidarity and industrial militancy. The experiment can be seen as a union retreat from confrontationism, a concession to managerialism, and a resignation to the dominance of individualism over collectivism. However, we argue that it has also widened the scope for both union and employee voice at workplace level.