Take a moment to absorb the innovative ways the government has found to undermine, demoralise, and attack NHS workers.

There’s the never-ending real terms pay cut which, by last year, had left the average health worker nearly £2,000 poorer in real terms than 2010. Ambulance crew are £5,286 worse off. There’s the starving of resources, even as an ageing population imposes greater demand – this has been the longest squeeze in spending as a proportion of GDP since its foundation. There’s the determination to privatise swaths of the service by stealth, and a chaotic top-down reorganisation which has fragmented the service.

This isn’t just about the public sector, of course. Today it was revealed that 179 employers have been failing to pay the legal minimum wage

Throw in the scrapping of NHS bursaries, too, which has led to a collapse in nursery and midwifery applications by nearly a quarter. Then there’s the demonisation of workers when they stand up for themselves, those who dedicate their lives to caring for those in need: take the junior doctors’ strike for example. And now the government is offering NHS staff a three-year pay deal which, in real terms, is yet another cut – and funded by slashing the holidays of the already overworked.

It is an insult to those who dedicate their lives to caring for an entire nation. And of course we all suffer for it. It means falling numbers of nurses, even as the population grows. It means vacancies in other critical posts across the NHS. It means falling morale, which could drive away the talented and decrease the standard of care. And all this because a political party bankrolled by the financial sector that caused the crash decided to make anyone but their benefactors pay for it.

This isn’t just about the public sector, of course. Today it was revealed that 179 employers have been failing to pay the legal minimum wage to thousands of staff: this is sure to be the tip of an extremely underpaid iceberg. This is a country, after all, where politicians extol work as the route from poverty, and yet most Britons languishing in poverty are in work. Both private and public sector workers are under attack – it’s important to make that point.

The Tory party and their media outriders excel at the politics of divide and rule. They say to struggling workers in the private sector: don’t resent your bosses for not paying you properly, instead turn on these pampered overpaid public sector types living in luxury with their gold-plated pensions. They’re like highway robbers who tell those they have stolen from to be angry that other victims may not have been robbed as much as they have.

A Labour government that can use the leverages of power to eliminate these injustices may be more than four years away. In the meantime, the answer is to struggle. At the moment, university workers – many in precarious situations – are on strike to defend their pensions. They have their employers on the run. They are an example to all workers in a society that is systematically rigged against them, whether they’re in the public or private sector.

It is worth noting, too, a day after International Women’s Day, that this is a war on women: those in public sector or low-paid private sector jobs are disproportionately likely to be women who have borne the brunt of government cuts. What most scares the vested interests and the political party who represents them are workers joining the dots: realising that their own struggles cannot be divorced from the injustices suffered by others.

Unity between private and public sector workers, from NHS staff and university workers to supermarket shelf-stackers to call centre operators: that is what poses the greatest threat to Britain’s unjust, crumbling order.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist