Why unions need to join the rest of us in the real world

Well, good luck to them. The prospects for a general strike in today's labour market are less than zero, and a campaign of school disruption will only undermine the state education system at a time when it is under unprecedented challenge, south of the Border at least. Nor will the tough talk about winters of discontent endear public-sector unions to the millions of non-public-sector workers who are already struggling in this harsh economic climate. When Bob the gob opens his mouth, he doesn't realise that many members of the public think he's spitting on them.

I've been a trades unionist all my life, but I despair at the unions' inability to realise how society has changed and adapt their rhetoric accordingly. Don't they understand how threatening the rebarbative language of scabs, strikes and disruption sound to other workers, especially women? Can't they see how their macho talk plays into the hands of the right-wing press? The Tories could hardly contain their glee at the "general strike" headlines last week and David Cameron said, in effect, "bring it on". There's nothing this government likes better than to see public-sector workers come out on strike, because they know that it diverts attention from the impact of their disastrous economic policies.

There is probably more popular discontent now at the way society is organised than at any time since the second world war. As the US polling expert Stan Greenberg pointed out last week, two-thirds of British voters think the economy is treating them too harshly and an even higher number feel that "upper-class" families are treated too generously. The "squeezed middle" is an ugly phrase, but it encapsulates a social reality: that more and more middle-class people are discovering that they are working-class in every sense of the word. But the trades unions, with their archaic imagery of industrial confrontation, appear to have nothing to say to them.

Indeed, the unions are failing to speak in a language that can be understood by the vast majority of workers who are not members of a union and can see no point in joining one. Nor has their rhetoric any relevance to the 2.5 million people who are unemployed, or the two million pensioners living in poverty. Nor does it register with the low-paid. Only one in seven private-sector workers is in a trades union. That is a shocking figure, a measure of the failure of the trades unions to keep up.

We live increasingly in a dog-eat-dog, zero-hours culture where most workers are desperate to hang on to any job at all. One million-and-a-half have gone part-time in the last five years and millions more have accepted pay reductions in order to keep their jobs. Private-sector pay has been falling in real terms for the last decade, and is now considerably less, on average, than in the public sector. The vast majority of private-sector workers either have no pension whatever, or have private pension savings so meagre that they will be condemned to poverty in retirement. In fact, outside the public sector, the very concept of retirement, like the final-salary pension, is becoming an anachronism as older people discover that they simply cannot afford to give up work, let alone retire at 60. Where is the union anger about that? Who speaks for them?

Public-sector workers have been adept at protecting their own interests. In Scotland they have a "no compulsory redundancy" job guarantee, protected pensions and a 2% pay rise next year. In many councils more than one-quarter of council tax goes to pay public-sector pensions. I don't begrudge public-sector workers their pensions. Few of them are going to be well off. And depriving them of their defined benefits isn't going to improve the lot of their fellow workers outside the comfort zone of the state. But there is a problem here, which is that the salaries and pensions of public-sector employees are to a large extent paid out of the taxes of workers who increasingly don't enjoy those benefits themselves.

Of course, the public-sector unions rightly say it is their job, first and foremost, to protect the pay and conditions of their members. If other workers don't join trades unions, how can they expect to benefit from them? Well, that's true. The age of insecurity has undermined faith in collective action. But the unions need to do more than make empty gestures of solidarity towards the millions who have lost touch with the union movement.

For many workers in retail, security, farms and building trades, union organisation barely exists. There are now more than four million self-employed workers who cannot be unionised. There are millions of low-paid workers in financial services and millions more on short-term sales-related contracts who don't understand how unions could help them because they can't go on strike. To these workers, trades unions are a purely public-sector phenomenon – part of a remote universe where jobs are for life and some workers still retire at 60 on index-linked pensions. They find it hard to understand why they, and not the bosses, should be the target of industrial action.

You see, wealthy people aren't affected by public-sector strikes because they don't use public services. The rich have private insurance, travel to work by car, send their children to private schools. Increasingly detached from society, they can look on with wry amusement as the "little people" fight it out among themselves. And anyway, they say, aren't the Bob Crows of this world, who earn greatly in excess of £100,000, only too keen to join their ranks? The days when trades union leaders made a point of living on something approaching their members' salaries are long gone.

Perhaps the first woman general secretary of the TUC, Frances O'Grady, will change things – though I wouldn't bet your pension on it. Perhaps the trades unions need to die to be reborn in some new form, perhaps drawing on the experience of the Occupy Movement, and the Arab Spring. Some believe social media could be used to develop a new form of workplace organisation, though I see little sign of it yet. As I get older I hear myself talking the language of New Labour, which is distressing. But Tony Blair was right about some things, and when he warned the trades unions that they had to change or die, he was only telling it like it is.