Striking in Britain has now reached an all-time low. Last year saw the fewest workers go on strike since records began in 1893. Is this a cause for celebration, a victory for partnership between capital and labour? The answer is a firm no.

Although striking is a last resort for workers on account of the lost wages incurred, the fact that only 170,000 days were lost to strikes in 2015 (compared with 29.5m in 1979) indicates just how weak the vast majority of workers feel they are in today’s labour market. It shows workers perceive themselves as ever more powerless to collectively stand up against the increasingly common employment practices of the likes of Sports Direct, Deliveroo and Hermes. Some companies now require employees to shoulder what were previously employer responsibilities (such as national insurance, pensions and sick pay) and be subject to pernicious performance management targets and monitoring.

The domination of labour by capital – on capital’s terms – has not been willingly entered into. It is the result of the weakening of workers’ labour market power. The job of unions is essentially to regulate the supply of labour in order to bid up its price (expressed in wages and conditions). One means of doing this is by withdrawing the willingness to work – or at least threatening to do so. But as recent Trades Union Congress research demonstrates, workers’ wages have fallen further in Britain since 2007 than in all other 28 OECD countries bar Greece. Clearly, Britain’s unions are not doing the job they are supposed to.

Why is this? Increasingly restrictive legal and judicial regulation of the right to strike is one part of the answer. The new Trade Union Act further tightens the screw on the legislation introduced by Conservative governments in the 1980s and 90s (which Labour governments of 1997-2010 did not reverse). So have various court judgments where employers gained injunctions against strikes. But if the law was such an important factor, why were strikes relatively more common 10 or 20 years ago?

Unions, as the key representative of workers, find themselves in a vicious downward spiral. Despite huge recruitment and retention efforts over the last two decades, unions represent an ever smaller proportion of workers in a continually expanding and deregulated labour market. In the private sector, where most employment is found, trade union membership is just 14%. It is a mere 25% overall.

In the face of sceptical non-members, perceived weakness is not a good recruiting sergeant. When workers ask “What can a union do for me?”, the answer is not terribly convincing, despite wages of unionised workers being higher than their non-unionised counterparts. What’s worse, most union members feel pretty powerless too. They lack the confidence to assert themselves to defend and advance their collective interests. There is a sense of fear as a result of job insecurity and the power of management.

But there are still some workers with the power to strike and win better terms and conditions. The best example is those working on the railways, represented by Aslef and RMT. They have the strategic power to stop their employers’ operations in a way that hurts them in the pocket, and to do so in an immediate way, given how few alternatives services exist and few substitute workers there are to do their jobs.

The quest is for other workers to realise their own strategic power. Distribution centres (such as those of Sports Direct in Shirebrook, Derbyshire), transport companies such as Hermes and Deliveroo as well as Eddie Stobart and a host of factories (such as Hovis) operate on “just-in-time” systems. These are fragile systems that are vulnerable to disruption. Unions’ role must be to convince these workers that they can wield this power if they act together.

Social media campaigns to damage brands and reputations can supplement strikes but they cannot replace them. Workers’ power is found, first and foremost, in the workplace. Workplaces are the means of production, distribution and exchange under capitalism. Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to introduce statutory bargaining rights for workers can help here but it will still require cognitive liberation in order for workers to use these rights for their own benefit. Only then will striking return to the rightful levels of before.