Fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s depend on the youth and cheeriness of their staff to sell that buzzy “Mickey D’s” product. It is no surprise, then, to see that same youth and energy in the workers who are on strike today in restaurants in Cambridge and Crayford, south-east London (McDonald’s argues that the strikers represent 0.01% of its UK workforce). Their demands are minimal: £10 an hour, an end to zero-hours contracts and union rights. They have, most of them, never had a working life where they were treated decently. To rise up like this, to risk losing their jobs, is admirable. No wonder they have garnered so much support. I hope a boycott of the company follows.

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This is so clearly a David and Goliath situation: an intensely rich global company on one side with some teenagers earning less than a fiver an hour on the other. It is billionaires against students who are trying to organise a life around random shifts, who have difficulty organising medical appointments or a tutorial because they don’t know far enough in advance when they are working.

This strike may be small, but it is highly significant. It is about wages, but something else too. It brings home just how callously young people can be treated. In the abstract, zero-hours contracts promise flexibility and of course this is what McDonald’s bosses are arguing, but in reality this constant insecurity – Have I upset the manager? If I go on holiday, will I return to the same shift pattern? What I am going to live on? – makes having an autonomous life difficult.

How have we stood by and let young workers be treated like this?

McDonald’s have said that they will introduce the option of guaranteed-hours contracts for all UK workers by the end of 2017. But many workers often do more than 35 hours a week without a living wage and without rights, living in a continually precarious state. Is this good enough? How can a 20-year-old pay rent on £6.84 an hour? It has become flip to say that all jobs these days are McJobs, but some really are and some people really are trapped.

The young workers who are striking are inspiring because they have not seen conditions deteriorate as many trade unionists have. Rather they are challenging a system in which they have never experienced a semblance of decent working conditions in the first place. Today’s 18-year-olds will never have felt unions can do much for them. Many will only ever have known work as a place where you can be jerked around, where the tiniest display of solidarity is difficult because if you complain you may immediately jeopardise your earnings that week.

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The actual figures are mind–boggling. A company that had revenues of £17bn, whose chief executive earned £11.82m last year, is not just paying poverty wages, it is forcing young people into this unstable but submissive existence. This is intolerable. How have we stood by and let young workers be treated like this? Globalisation doesn’t just mean exploiting workers in “faraway” places, it means sacrificing our own young.

This is why it is so inspiring to see them fight back. It takes nerve. And this handful of workers have it. We know that strikes are too easily portrayed as the archaic and macho activities of a now defunct industrial class. We know that the atomised nature of the modern workplace makes union activity difficult, but the McStrike shows it is not impossible.

This strike is not harking back. It is symbolic of the present, not the past. It is local but supported by other fast-food workers internationally. It is about class, of course, but it is also about young people refusing to be disposable. They are not lovin’ it and they are not havin’ it. All power to them.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist