CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Between Order and Upheaval

Photograph Source: College of Arms – Public Domain

“In my beginning is my end,” wrote T. S. Eliot.

Every so often—after writing nearly a dozen articles on this subject—I return to the same question: where, exactly, are industrial relations in the UK right now?

There are no easy answers—or so I have found. Not least because it is a question so rarely asked by a largely indifferent press. This, despite the increasing noise from the union camp. What passes for union coverage arrives only in fragments: a single remark inflated into a story here, a minor dispute pressed into service there. The whole is lost in the parts. What should be emerging is not a series of isolated disputes, but a broader transformation in how industrial conflict now operates.

I have already committed to filming three elements vying for control of this unowned narrative. One is a long piece to camera introducing the basic concept of what an organisation of workers actually is—obvious, but routinely overlooked. Another is shot from the top front window of a red double-decker London bus, the city rushing past as I deliver a voiceover dense with union facts. The third, focused on fringe groupings within unions, is filmed outside Somerset House beside Tai Shani’s vast, mechanical, breathing “sleeping beauty”—an artwork suspended in an extended transparent case. The film, like the system it attempts to capture, refuses to resolve into a single narrative.

And yet something more coherent is taking shape. It is happening both in reality and in its attempt at representation. This is not a single change, nor a simple sequence of staged developments, but a systemic shift across the entire field. Law, for one, is changing. Conflicts are becoming more sustained, more visible. Political control—once more clearly exercised—is truly loosening, as unions become harder to read and less predictable.

At the centre of all this sits the Employment Rights Act 2025, now fully in force. Among its provisions is a workers’ rights enforcement body—the Fair Work Agency—with very real powers to enter workplaces, seize documents, and even make arrests. The details are technical; the implications most certainly are not. Safeguards that once insulated businesses have been weakened or removed. Thresholds have fallen. The act of organising—of sustaining a dispute, of pursuing a claim—becomes materially far easier.

But a more difficult question sits beneath this: on whose behalf is this new, almost sudden, architecture operating?

Union density has been declining for decades, yet........

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