Only unions can give the better employment rights

Second, the former Barnsley HQ of the National Union of Mineworkers became the national base for supporting a new genre of trade union membership: for the past couple of years, the unemployed, the retired and students have been able to join Unite for 50p a week. This entitles them to practical support. Third, the Resolution Foundation reported that one in three young adults aged 21 to 30 are now classed as low paid, triple the figure 40 years ago. Fourth, Owen Jones published The Establishment, demonstrating the huge, increasing divide between an elite and the rest of us. And fifth, the acronym "gringo" was fashioned: graduates in non-graduate occupations.

None of these were related, but they are all connected. Most young people are struggling for what the policy makers call "labour market insertion" much more intensely than for at least the past three generations. In other words, it is so much harder to get a job. Those who do manage to do so often find their conditions of employment far less than desirable. They are often on zero hours contracts, trying to piece together a reasonable, though always unpredictable income, through engaging with more than one employer. Those with qualifications, up to degrees, find themselves taking jobs that are not commensurate with their achievements in education - hence the "gringos".

It is a grim picture that, seemingly, few saw coming. But one person did. John Healey, an MP and former Labour government minister, was the campaigns and communications officer for the TUC in the 1990s. At that time, he and I had a conversation about the "individualisation" of employment, the decline in trade union membership among the young and the clear trends away from mass employment in key sectors of the economy - the traditional power base of trade unionism. He was keen to develop a project concerned with making trade unions relevant to the next generation. He convened a group of 30 people at Ruskin College, Oxford. A third were active trade unionists, another third political activists in other ways and a third were non-aligned. In each of these three groups, half were under 30 years of age and half over.

For two days, we deliberated on Healey's question and a cunning plan distilled. Young people under 25 who were in work but in non-trade union workplaces should be able to affiliate to the TUC at a nominal membership fee or possibly free of charge. They should be able to access routine rights to trade union benefits, support and representation. We did not consider extending such an offer to pensioners, students or the unemployed, as Unite has, more recently, done. But the thinking was similar. Our focus was on working young people who saw no value in trade union membership and viewed the unions as dinosaurs from days gone by, irrelevant to life in Thatcher's and Major's Britain.

Following the Ruskin meeting, I came up with the idea of a national poster campaign to recruit young people through the new arrangements, along the lines of the National Lottery.

"Secure employment? High wages? Holiday pay? Pension entitlement? Good conditions? It could be you! But it probably isn't. Join a trade union today." We had the thought of a Kitchener-like World War I recruitment poster: "Your trade union needs you; you need a trade union."

But the thinking never quite came to fruition. Despite some senior trade unionists being part of the Ruskin exercise, others in the high command of the trade union movement remained cautious. Moreover, the legal advice was that the promoters of the National Lottery would never permit the strapline "It Could Be You" to be used for a poster campaign. Whether such an initiative would have made any difference to the contemporary plight of young people inside or beyond the workplace is impossible to say.

What is patently clear is that whichever route the individual self-determination that has been cultivated for them by successive governments propels them in, there are few certainties or guarantees. Young people desperately need advocacy and support over pay, terms and conditions of employment, and fair and equal treatment - the very stuff that guides and governs the trade union movement. Instead, they now face massive unpredictability about their prospects and possibilities in the unregulated labour market. Ironically, that certainly is a lottery.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales