It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Four decades after the winter of discontent, after Margaret Thatcher’s government and its successors gave Britain some of the most draconian anti-union laws in the world, and long after unions were further weakened by self-employment, individualism and political apathy, it is still surprisingly easy to find yourself on the receiving end of industrial action.

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If you have children at school, or use public transport, or state services from hospitals to universities to libraries, then the austerity years since 2010 have been sporadically punctuated by clusters of strikes. Last month Post Office workers and Southern rail drivers stopped work. This week there has already been a strike by London Underground station staff, and others are scheduled by British Airways cabin crew, and again by the drivers of Southern rail.

For the rightwing press, after the Brexit vote and 2015’s Conservative election win even more accustomed than usual to getting its way, the strikes are an affront. “Swaggering union bully boys must be brought to heel,” fumed the Daily Express last month. The same day, a spokesman for Theresa May said: “The strikes are wrong and they are causing untold misery to hundreds of thousands.” The strikers were showing “contempt for ordinary people trying to go about their daily lives” – as if the strikers were not themselves ordinary people, whose lives were sometimes disrupted by strikes, and who might therefore understand the wider implications.

But anti-union rhetoric generally has little interest in facts. Comparing the current strikes to those of the 70s, as the tabloids often do, is absurd, and all but the most excitable or ignorant journalists and politicians know it. In 1979, more than 29m working days were lost to industrial action. Over the first 10 months of last year – the most recent period for which records are available – the figure was 281,000.

In the 70s, the annual number of days lost regularly exceeded 10m. Since Thatcher left office in 1990, it has rarely reached 1m, despite a growing working population. Of all the indicators of the right’s ascendancy in modern Britain, the long-term decline in employee rebellions against employers is one of the starkest. The anachronistic use of the word “industrial” to describe these disputes is revealing: in most of the UK private sector, union membership has slipped below 14% of employees, according to the department for business, making it seem as much a relic of the past as manufacturing.

The real motive behind the rightwing hyperbole about strikes is to make them nearly or actually impossible. This ambition has a long history. In January 1979, when UK union membership was close to its peak of 56% of all employees, and trade unionism pervaded everyday life – from enduring pop anthems such as the Strawbs’ Part of the Union to a lavish new holiday centre for Transport and General Workers’ Union members in Tory Eastbourne – Margaret Thatcher said in a TV interview that if she came to power she might outlaw strikes in “essential services”.

She never did; such services were difficult to define, and public opinion did not support a ban sufficiently. Yet since the Conservatives returned to office in 2010, the tabloids and even relative Tory liberals such as Boris Johnson have shown renewed interest in a selectively authoritarian approach to industrial relations.

Meanwhile, even more sweeping anti-strike measures have been hinted at: in July 2015, the then skills minister Nick Boles suggested that tube strikes in London lacked legitimacy because tube users were “not represented” in strike ballots. By this logic, any disruptive – in other words, effective – strike would require a public consent so wide as to be virtually unachievable.

In 1983, Thatcher’s employment secretary Norman Tebbit, who devised the modern legislative ratchet against unions, told TUC general secretary Len Murray that the “prime role” of unions “should be to help improve the performance of their firms which provided their members with jobs”. This subservient trade unionism is a dream still shared by many Tories, and many employers. But the persistence of the strike impulse where employees are still relatively powerful and hard to replace – the public sector, in the drivers’ cabs of trains – suggests that the less biddable side of trade unionism will probably never be eradicated.

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Yet if the strike is going to be a political tactic that delivers gains not just for narrow groups of workers but for millions, as it sometimes did in the 70s (many of those participating in the winter of discontent were low-paid women), then unions will have to get better at recruiting and politicising young, insecure, often freelance workers. Even more than public sector employees, they have been squeezed by the UK’s ever more unequal austerity economy. Their lot will probably worsen further this year, as rising inflation eats into their flimsy incomes.

A strike, or the threat of one, ought to be more than a ritual confrontation, or a rearguard action. It ought to be a way for employees to be empowered, to pressure their employers, and win concessions – just as modern businesses pressure employees and win concessions almost every day.

In recent years, there have been small signs of militancy in new places: campaigns for cleaners, cycle couriers and Deliveroo riders, often successfully coordinated by an irreverent new union, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain. But for most Britons under the age of 50, a strike is just faded TV archive footage or an inconvenience, rather than something they understand or might occasionally take part in. That needs to change.