Heart Union Week 2026: learning to love the tradition of collective organisation & action
9-15th February 2026 is ‘heart’ unions week. Of course 14th February is Valentine’s Day but the week underlines that ‘love’, or perhaps fellowship, is collective as well as individual.
As they usually do, unions and workplace organising face some challenges
In terms of strikes the figures which until recently were amongst the lowest since the early 1890s when records began rose sharply from mid-2022 although they have dropped back a bit with some significant disputes winning real advances and new issues arising. The density of union membership still leaves a lot to be desired but overall trade union membership is steady and rising in some sectors of the workforce. Trade unions and collective action, partly thanks to Government intransigence from 2010-2024, have become popular again.
The passage of the Employment Relations Act in December 2025 provides a framework for improving collective organisation at work and increased union membership. Time is of the essence. The far right political business Reform remains ahead in the polls and its ever changing cast of MPs consistently voted against the Act in the Commons.
Union membership still needs to be higher and industrial action in hospitality and by security guards shows that unions are quite capable of organising in less traditional areas of workplace strength.
This can change very quickly. You need only look at the 1889 London dock strike- previously unorganised workers with a strike wave across the London and other areas of the UK to underwrite matters- to understand that periods of apparent quiet can suddenly explode.
It’s important also to grasp a wider context.
The reality is that if you are not a trade union member your ability to do much about any issue at work is very limited indeed. And if you are then there is the perpetual work of making sure the union effectively represents people- that only comes from an active membership not a benign General Secretary! It will also help if you are actively politically. A change of Government that is broadly on the side of working people when it comes to the Employment Relations Act is a start but as Raymond Williams once noted it’s not just a question of kicking out the Tories, we have to keep on kicking. Bad bosses have not gone away.
Self-activity is the start. As the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted the world won’t change itself for the better on its own. People are required for that, and people organised in some form of collective activity, which is why being in a union is as important now as it was in the 1890s.
Kmflett's Blog 
This resonates deeply Keith, and I wholeheartedly agree with all of it. As an employer I tried to persuade ‘my staff’ – the people who ran ‘my pub business’ – to unionise way back, must have been around 2002 / 2003 maybe earlier – because I believed – and still do – in all of that above. In fact I tried to get Unite, GMB and more recently other unions to talk to me about setting up a pub company unionised from day one and they all brushed me off. Anyway the people who ran my business for me wouldn’t unionise because, they said, they couldn’t see the point in spending the union fee when they all felt secure in their jobs… employed by me – I think they thought I was naive.
And that resonates with your last paragraph –
“Self-activity is the start. As the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted the world won’t change itself for the better on its own. People are required for that, and people organised in some form of collective activity, which is why being in a union is as important now as it was in the 1890s.”
Ho hum. We need a people’s pub partnership for pubs