Despite growing concerns over wage stagnation and insecure work, far fewer young people are members of unions,” were the journalist Kamal Ahmed’s actual words on the Today programme, describing the wage gap between the over-30s and the young. Frances O’Grady, the TUC leader, is heroically patient in trying to keep the commentariat on track: this is no crazy paradox, that at the very moment people need unions the most, they stop joining them. It is precisely because the young are ghettoed in low-wage sectors where unions aren’t recognised; it is because their work is insecure that they have no leverage; it is because their wages are stagnant that they can’t build up the savings cushion you’d need, if you wanted to make trouble on a zero-hours contract.

The tendency to look at all hardship through the wrong end of the telescope – why do people on low wages eat so badly? – is not new, but in analysing the conditions of the younger millennial, the debate has progressed from having its arse on backwards to being deliberately, comprehensively wrong.

Young people can’t organise in the workplace because they’re too narcissistic, goes the argument. They can’t afford houses because they eat too many avocados. They don’t get paid for the first five years of their careers because they can’t tie their own shoelaces. They don’t need living rooms because they’re always out eating £15 burgers. They’re anxious because they’re snowflakes. They don’t understand hard work, and the fact that they do so well at A-level and beyond is due to grade inflation, which is somehow also their fault. They’re not political any more, until they are, whereupon they’re in cloud-cuckoo land.

Structural pressures back up to make the lives of the under-30s economically unviable. Housing is impossible because of student debt, inability to save for a deposit, stagnant and falling wages, the investment value of land peeling away from use value and the role of housing debt in the wider economy. The lending of the 90s and 00s drove prices up faster than wages; even if you could still get the famous “underwater mortgage” that did for Northern Rock (when you could borrow 105% of the asking price), you still – on an average income for a 30-year-old – wouldn’t be able to afford a third of an average home.

The “gig economy” is a euphemism for chronic precariousness. Internships are no more than the repudiation of the precept of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, which is how we all clawed our way out of serfdom in the first place. Apprenticeships are code for exploitation. A Kafka-esque logic has emerged where you have no value to an employer until you’re experienced, yet all the cost of gaining experience has to be generated by your worthless labours. The condition of youth is like a claw game in an arcade: if you do everything right, work hard, concentrate, make wise choices, save for your pension, get your head down at university, consider your options, you should, in principle, be able to pick up the plushy with the giant claw. Except you can’t, because it’s physically impossible.

In real life, of course, there is no shortage of creative, collective action among the young. Housing activism ranges from Generation Rent to Acorn, the country’s first community union. The direct-action groups Focus E15 and New Era 4 All did not originate with the middle-aged. The idea of the pop-up union – people uniting to support each other across sectors, with legal rather than wildcat strike action, on a time-limited basis – originated on a university campus. Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming support among 18- to 24-year-olds is written off as naivety by those whom it pleases to believe that anything not resembling the status quo is unrealistic. The smarter right feels the chill of change on simple demographics, since the direction of travel is more likely to be set by those who are still alive a decade hence.

But they’re missing the bigger ruction, that for all the differences of opportunity and wealth between the young – and those still exist – no one under 30 is served by an economy that loads them with debt, locks them out of property and then doesn’t reward them with the dignity of decent wages at work. As the sociologist Phil Burton-Cartledge pointed out, “the often noted ‘age effect’ is actually a cohort class effect”.

The TUC is right: young people should join a union; workplaces should recognise collective bargaining; if this is a class cohort, nobody could tell you more about mobilising as a class bloc than a trade union. But any explanation for young people’s failure to do so that relies on personal deficiencies will turn out to be catastrophically complacent.

Also this week, the young were revealed to be less proud of their Englishness than ever before, with one in 10 saying they were actively embarrassed. There is nothing more corrosive to patriotism, of course, than hearing your situation blithely, constantly misrepresented by your countrymen. A lack of national pride may feel like the least of our problems, set against the damage done when there’s a surfeit of it. Yet it speaks not of cynicism, but of a failure of reciprocity. It’s hard to love a country that shows no sign of loving you.

• Zoe Williams is a regular Guardian contributor