Nights spent staring at the ceiling as worries dance manically around the brain. Taking a deep breath before opening the gas bill. Sacrificing a hot meal so your children don’t need to. Living with personal debt can be draining and emotionally exhausting, and it is the everyday experience of all too many Britons. According to a new TUC report, 3.2m British households face problem debt, meaning they spend more than a quarter of their overall income repaying unsecured borrowings (ie, excluding mortgages). For 1.6m households in extreme debt, the picture is even bleaker: more than 40% of their income goes to creditors.

Wages growth is at a record low – unless you're a Commonwealth Bank CEO | Greg Jericho Read more

This is the lived experience of Britain’s working poor, those who keep the country ticking with their hard graft and are rewarded with poverty and insecurity. British workers have suffered the longest fall in wages since Queen Victoria sat on the throne. Between 2007 and 2015, real wages fell by an astonishing 10.4% - the worst fall in any advanced nation other than Greece. Growing personal debt is the price many British workers have paid for the disastrous economic failure of George Osborne and his colleagues – one of whom is now the nation’s prime minister.

What’s the cure? The government will undoubtedly point to a rising minimum wage, but tax and benefit changes are projected to leave many workers worse off regardless in the coming years. The introduction of a genuine living wage – rather than a minimum wage rebranded as something it is not – would help, and it is welcome that both Labour leadership candidates are committed to it. But the case must be made for workers coming together to secure improved wages: trade unionism, in other words.

Even during the boom years, wages were stagnating or even falling for millions of British workers. What were the consequences? Billions more pounds of public money spent on in-work benefits to compensate, for a start. But in the years leading up to the crash, many workers took on more personal debt to maintain their slipping living standards. That’s not good for the workers, and it’s not good for the economy, either. But this was at a time when many companies were reporting healthy profits. They just weren’t sharing the wealth with the workforce who created it in the first place. And why should they? With trade unionism so defeated by punitive laws and industrial decline, they faced little pressure to do so.

Britain’s working poor keep the country ticking with their hard graft and are rewarded with poverty and insecurity

In Nordic countries, it is the norm for workers to be unionised. Better living standards and more equality than we have in Britain are two of the byproducts. Jeremy Corbyn – near-certain to be re-elected Labour leader next month – has unveiled policies such as compulsory collective bargaining for companies with more than 250 workers. Such an approach would help lift the wages of workers, not only for their own good, but for the good of the British economy, too. But the positive case for trade unionism cannot just be left to politicians: it needs to be made by all of us. It needs to be put in a language that resonates with the millions of non-unionised workers, and particularly for younger people for whom the very notion of trade unionism seems culturally alien. Personal debt is a blight in modern Britain – and trade unionism is one of its cures.