Have we heard the last of labour correspondents?

They are the lost tribe of British journalism. Trying to find a labour or industrial correspondent in a newsroom today is like entering the Disappearing World.

They have vanished. Just one full-time correspondent, the Press Association's highly respected Alan Jones, is still on the labour beat.

Once the Labour and Industrial Correspondents Association (LICA) had up to 70 members. The Financial Times alone employed six on its labour desk. In the past, there were enough labour correspondents to mount a cricket team to play the union barons before the Trades Union Congress (TUC) started each year. Today, they could not umpire that match.

On 16 March, the last rites will be sounded for their association with a Media Society/LICA debate, symbolically at the TUC, on the Strange Death of the Labour Corrs.

They were the aristocrats of the newsrooms of the 1960s and 1970s. Top of the tree. High up the pecking order; even higher than the lobby corrs. Many of the great names of modern British journalism started or stayed as labour corrs - Peter Sissons, Peter Jenkins, John Cole, Geoffrey Goodman, Kevin Maguire, John Lloyd, Bernard Ingham, Richard Littlejohn and Andrew Neil among their number. Some will take part in that Media Society debate.

But just where have they all gone? Like the rest of the country, they were 'Thatchered' in the 1980s. Unions were tamed/neutered (you decide) by Margaret Thatcher (and her messenger Bernard Ingham); membership of unions plummeted; strikes became historic; and so too did those who reported the struggle of labour with capital. No labour movement, no labour correspondents needed.

British industry changed too. Manufacturing became increasingly a thing of the past. Factories and mines closed and were converted to shopping malls, enterprise zones or wasteland. Cities like Coventry became mere shadows of their former mighty industrial selves. The whole pattern of employment was transformed for the better/worse (you decide).

In the new era, service industry workers are loath to organise, and even loather to strike. Walkouts are non-existent at call centres. There's not much left to report on the labour front. Labour corrs have joined Britain's industrial museum - a relic, like her car industry.

Intriguingly, the decline of the labour corr has coincided with the rise of the union spin doctor -there to massage the image of the declining unions; to keep the general secretary from talking to the press directly and maybe inappropriately. Some, like Charlie Whelan of Unite, have become powers and personalities in their own right.

But the last two decades has also seen the rise of the cult of business and business journalism. Mammon became the new God. Huge business sections sprouted in the posh and not-so-posh papers, filled with ads for the new capitalism, and content to match.

Playing footsie with the FTSE became the norm. Business was 'in' - so 1990's - labour was 'out' - so 1970's. The denouement of that uncritical approach was seen in the Great Crash (Mark Two) of 2008. Many banks plummeted like Icarus, having sailed too close to the bad debt sun. Few of the business corrs saw that coming. Fewer still could explain it.

But ... with the coalition government cutting public spending deeper than even Margaret Thatcher dared, are there signs of the labour behemoth stirring again? The TUC itself is calling a march in London against 'The Cuts' on 26 March.

Could we see a return of strikes and winters of discontent over the next four years as the unemployment register mounts? Might the labour corrs be in for a second wind; a return from their professional grave? The obituaries may be premature.

Above: Police remove a protestor from outside the Grunwick factory in Willesden during a protest in July 1977. The strike at the Grunwick photograph-processing plant lasted from 1976 to 1978.

Labour Correspondents - RIP, A Media Society/LICA debate will take place at the TUC on Wednesday 16 March at 6.30pm.Tickets/more information from the Media Society.