Where Did All the Workers Go?

Television once portrayed labour struggles and the central role work plays in our lives. Why have modern dramas pushed these stories off screen?

The original TV cast of Boys From The Blackstuff. (Credit: BBC)

We see workplaces on our televisions each and every night. Rarely, however, do we see much about the process of work that goes on there or people’s collective experience of it. Staff relations, let alone industrial relations, barely get a look in. Consequently, we never get near a full and truthful depiction of work. Granted, some work is boring and repetitive and would not make for great television. Still, work takes up most of our waking lives and is necessary for the income that 99 percent of us rely on to survive. It deserves to be portrayed with honesty and seriousness.

Take the most common genre on television, the detective crime drama. Whether it is Bergerac , Blue Lights , Broadchurch , Happy Valley or Line of Duty , the setting is in and around the police station. But because the focus is on the individual talents of police officers finding the perpetrator, the collective effort, including backroom staff, receives scant attention. The closest we get in the multitudes of police dramas to any mention of collective relations is when an officer facing a disciplinary meeting asks, ‘Should I get my Police Federation rep to attend?’

That is because the bread and butter of these crime dramas is individual interpersonal conflict. Many of these storylines unfold outside the workplace and are largely unconnected to it. On the rare occasions when workplace dynamics are shown, they tend to centre on overbearing, irrational, and self-serving senior officers belittling their subordinates.

It is not just police dramas. Series set in hospitals and medical centres (Casualty and Holby City), in schools (Ackley Bridge and Waterloo Road), in prisons (Screw and Time), and in offices (The Office and W1A) all follow a similar pattern.

In hospitals and schools there has been limited recognition that these are among the most highly unionised workplaces in the country. Beginning in 1986, early episodes of Casualty mentioned the British Medical Association. An episode in 1989 was titled ‘Union’, and Martin ‘Ash’ Ashford, played by Patrick Robinson, was the most prominent union representative in the show’s history. In Waterloo Road , Grantly Budgen, played by Philip Martin Brown, served as staff representative for many years. In prison dramas, staffing levels are a recurring theme and the Prison Officers Association has featured.

Yet these are exceptions, not the rule. It was not always this way. Series such as The Rag Trade , Making Out and Clocking Off featured workplace relations and union representatives without reducing work to a backdrop for personal dramas. Better still were several programmes in the BBC’s Play for Today series, which ran from 1970 to 1984. The Black Stuff in 1980, which later led to Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982, alongside Hard Labour , The Rank and File , Leeds – United! and The Slab Boys , stand out. Jim Allen, Roy Battersby and Ken Loach were among the writers and directors behind these social realist depictions of work and workplace relations, bringing to the small screen an artistic approach that sought to reflect the economic, social and political conditions of workers and the working class.

That is why there was considerable interest in Channel 5’s 2025 relaunch of Play for Today. Though it is still early days, there has so far been only one episode centred on work: a struggling Liverpool school thrown into chaos by a surprise OFSTED inspection, already grappling with demoralised staff, hungry students and chronic underfunding.

While there is still a need for escapism and entertainment to lighten the burdens of working life, the pendulum has swung too far in ignoring the realities of work on television. Instead, we are fed a steady diet of reality shows, competition and talent contests, love and dating formats, property makeovers, alongside endless panel and quiz shows. This deliberate absence of serious depictions of work does not merely make for poor art and culture; it also helps explain why workers are encouraged to acquiesce by accepting their lot in life. If more mainstream dramas resembled films such as Norma Rae , Made in Dagenham and Matewan , portraying workers who refuse to accept their lot, then revolt and resistance would be easier to legitimise and to replicate. That was what Allen, Battersby and Loach set out to achieve.

Returning to that kind of social realism on television will not be easy. But it is necessary if the lives of working people are to be fully and accurately represented and if those portrayals are to act as a spur, encouraging workers to improve their own conditions through collective action.