Photo by Avery Evans

The scale of industrial disputes currently taking place across the UK suggests a trade-union landscape in motion. Unions are depicted as more confident and legally protected than at any point since the 1970s—yet their actions remain fragmented by sector, geography, and timing.

To critics, Antonio Gramsci’s observation feels apt: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

But theory will get us only so far.

Perhaps closer attention should be paid to how unions are attempting to organise more effectively. Whether welcomed or not, this may yet amount to a form of revival. This can only be understood if we accept that industrial action today no longer resembles the mass protests associated with earlier periods of union power—and for good reason.

Today’s disputes are different. They are shaped by an irregular labour market and rely increasingly on enterprise-level bargaining, operating within a political culture where national confrontation carries significant risk. This means injunctions, lost pay, dismissal, even de-recognition.

Under these new conditions, smaller actions can sometimes reflect not failure but intelligent strategy—an effort to apply pressure where control is possible rather than where it might once have been expected. What this reflects is not retreat but recalibration. As Bernie Sanders has often argued in a very different national context, “unions built the middle class of this country, and they will build the middle class of the future.” The form that organisation takes may change, but its economic function does not.

Nowhere is this tension clearer than in health, where even limited industrial action reveals just how fragile the system has become.

In England, the government is wary of another prolonged confrontation with resident doctors—always an emotive issue—aware that it carries significant political and operational costs. Leaders within the National Health Service have warned that the service is already operating at what one describes as “permanent surge capacity,” leaving little slack to absorb further walkouts.

The stakes are high—higher than they were a year ago. Waiting-list performance remains fragile, and, unlike previous confrontations, both sides now appear focused on endurance rather than escalation, suggesting that at least some of the lessons of 2023 have been learned.

The contrast with Scotland—where ministers moved earlier to settle—has........

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