How does it feel to be invited to discuss the Just Transition in Whitehall? After a decade working offshore, Mike Sarnecki reflects
on his experience challenging London’s civil servants, and what it would look like for workers to really be involved in the transition.

Earlier this year, my colleagues from Platform and I travelled to London for a meeting at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. We had come to talk about what North Sea workers need, what we fear, and what a fair transition would actually look like from the deck of a platform rather than a desk in Whitehall. Partway through the conversation, it became clear I was the first oil and gas worker these civil servants had ever sat around a table with.

Sit with that for a moment. These are the people working on the North Sea Jobs Service, the flagship scheme launching early next year, which is meant to carry tens of thousands of workers like me from a declining basin into whatever comes next. They are considerate and they were listening. But the transition of my industry had been underway for years before a single one of us made it into the room.

I’ve spent over a decade offshore as a contractor. I didn’t arrive as a driller or an engineer. I got in through catering, feeding crews through long shifts and hard weather, and I learned fast that off shore your life sits in the hands of the person next to you. That trust is the one thing the industry has never managed to cut. Everything else has been shrinking around us for years. Jobs, budgets, salaries, paid training, and the patience of the people waiting at home for the phone to ring.

So when I hear of workers being put ‘at the centre of the transition’, I measure it against that meeting in London. What involvement currently means, in practice, is this: plans are drafted, announcements are made, and somewhere down the line workers are invited to respond to decisions already taken. A consultation after the fact is not involvement. It’s preaching to a captive audience.

Grangemouth is the proof. The owners confirmed the refinery’s closure in September 2024 and only then did the statutory consultation with the workforce begin. It covered redundancy terms and the next steps, not the future of the site. Workers got a say on the severance package, never on the decision around the closure itself. And Grangemouth is not a one off. The North Sea Transition Deal, the central agreement shaping my industry’s future, was struck be tween government and industry with not a single worker representative in its governance. Only this January, after years of pressure, did unions finally win seats on the new North Sea Future Board. It should not have taken half a decade to win such basic recognition. The test now is whether those seats carry real weight.

Real involvement means something else entirely. It means workers helping to design the retraining pathways, the timelines and the safeguards before the ink runs dry, because we’re the ones who know which skills actually transfer, which promises have been broken before, and what happens to a town when the company walks away.

And here I have to say something that may feel uncomfortable to a readership that includes a lot of trade unionists. Our unions are not doing enough to get us into that room. Offshore workers are split between several unions, while many contractors and agency workers, who make up the majority of the workforce in some roles, belong to no union at all. The divisions between and within unions are real, and every demarcation dispute, and turf war is a gift to companies and a closed door in Whitehall. When there’s finally a seat at the table, who gets to sit in it? The solidarity we practise offshore, watching each other’s backs because nobody else will, is exactly what trade unionism is supposed to be. Workers need our unions to match it onshore with one coordinated offshore voice organised across union lines, taking into account contractors and agency workers, as well as direct employees. Without that, ‘worker involvement’ will remain reduced to whoever government officials find most convenient to invite.

I got tired of waiting to be asked. So, in my worker organiser involvement with Platform, I spent weeks building a workers’ survey to gather the evidence that should shape the Jobs Service, because a launch is a starting point, not a finished design. It’s now live with an impressive volume of responses from workers across oil, gas and renewables. Getting there has meant real outreach: in canteens, offices and corridors, over calls, messages and emails, and inclusive of people who’ve already left the industry and never get asked anything once they’re gone. What those conversations tell me is that workers have detailed, practical, sometimes brilliant ideas about how this transition should run. The expertise exists. What’s missing is a gateway to carry it into the rooms where decisions get made. So here is my answer to the question in the title. Four tests that any transition plan should pass before it gets to call itself just:

1. Workers at the design table, not the feedback stage. If the workforce first hears about a plan at its launch, it isn’t our plan. The Jobs Service is the test case. Will it be built with us from the start, or announced to us at the end?

2. Recognition of the skills we already have. Offshore workers are exactly who should be building and maintaining renewables, with funded, accessible retraining rather than a queue behind school leavers for entry level jobs.

3. Honest timelines. Jobs that arrive before the redundancies, not years after. Workers can handle hard truths. What breaks trust is promise after promise that never lands.

4. A public stake big enough to last. Through Great British Energy and public ownership, decisions should answer to workers and communities, not to shareholders who are first to protest a windfall levy and first to walk when the going gets tough.

There is a bigger prize here too. If the UK is serious about setting an example for net zero, it must do so by demonstrating a successful transition in which workers’ welfare and our futures are central to the planning, not an afterthought. No country will follow a model that leaves its workforce behind.

I shouldn’t have been the first oil and gas worker those officials had hosted. I’d better not be the last. If you’re reading this as an industry worker, fill in the survey. If you are a union member, share it with your branch and ask your union what it’s doing, with the others rather than against them, to get workers into the room. The North Sea was built by our labour. Its decommissioning, and what succeeds it, should be shaped by our voices too