Andrea Egan, the new general secretary of Unison — the UK's largest trade union — has named the asymmetry that structures British industrial policy: North Sea oil and gas workers receive crisis-level ministerial attention, while the millions employed in the NHS, education, local government, and social care absorb cuts in near-silence. Her intervention lands just as the government approved the Jackdaw gasfield under enormous pressure from the fossil fuel industry and right-wing politicians. The political math is stark. Oil and gas employment in the UK has been declining for years and now represents a small fraction of the workforce, yet it commands outsized lobbying power and media attention. Public services employ millions, underpin every community, and have endured years of real-terms cuts — yet no comparable political mobilisation exists to protect those jobs. Egan's argument is not that oil workers don't matter; it's that the ratio of political energy to workforce size is grotesquely skewed. Jackdaw's approval is the proximate trigger, but the deeper story is about what kinds of work the state considers worth fighting for. Climate campaigners and many Labour MPs argue the decision contradicts the UK's climate commitments and does nothing meaningful for bills, energy security, or long-term employment. A final decision on the larger Rosebank oilfield looms before year-end, with Labour MPs reportedly lobbying Andy Burnham and John Healey not to overrule Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh if she moves to block it. The trade union movement itself is split along sectoral lines. Unite and GMB, representing oil and gas workers directly, back more drilling licences. Unison and the National Education Union oppose new extraction as part of a broader push toward sustainable, unionised employment. The fault line maps neatly onto short-term incumbency protection versus long-term structural transition. A key concern is job quality in renewables. Much of the rapidly growing green energy sector remains non-unionised, meaning lower pay, weaker protections, and less security than legacy fossil fuel roles. Unison's new recognition deal with Octopus Energy — the UK's largest energy company and a renewables-focused outfit — is an attempt to change that calculus. The GMB had also pursued recognition at Octopus but lost out; the company cited Unison's commitment to the energy transition. The structural question Egan is raising goes beyond any single gasfield decision. If the government treats fossil fuel employment as a political emergency while allowing public sector headcount to erode through attrition and cuts, it is making an implicit choice about which workers — and which communities — deserve state protection. That choice has compounding consequences over decades. The Jackdaw approval, the Rosebank decision ahead, and the budget's incorporation of these projects into fiscal forecasts all suggest the government's revealed preference: incumbent extractive industries with concentrated political power get defended; diffuse public sector employment does not. Egan is forcing the question of whether that preference is a policy or just an accident of lobbying asymmetry.
