Commuting in London is rarely a piece of cake, but yesterday took the biscuit. On the first full day of the RMT strike, I watched and waited as bus after bus trundled past my stop, too full to load any more of us on. Each bus was crammed gunnell to gunnell with nervy commuters, unaccustomed to travelling to work by means other than the tube and glancing fearfully out of the grimy, grafitti-smeared windows.

Half an hour went by. As a slightly less rammed bus hove into view, I chanced my arm and shouldered my way on. Standing room only, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the chaos generated by Boris’ contingency plan, which failed to forsee that doubling the number of buses on the road might also halve their speed. Mine crawled along commendably to a symphony of tutting and watch-tapping, before the announcement came that it could only complete the first third of its journey. Tutting more loudly to no avail, we were turfed out at St Paul’s.

The bus I eventually boarded from there, still crammed, had abandoned any requirement to pay for one’s journey, owing mostly to the fact that the lower deck was too packed for anyone to get near the Oystercard-scanner. I looked in vain for a scrap of our fabled Blitz spirit; from what I could see and the subsequent state of my shins, it was every briefcase and kitten heel for themself. Sandwiched for another half-hour between students and suits, like a diagram charting the evolution of Homo Dailygrindus, I made it into work a full ninety minutes late and over two hours after leaving home.

My return journey was slightly eased by anticipation of what awaited me, but only slightly. Not only was everything on the road still moving incredibly slowly, but passengers were packed in like strap-hanging sardines, foreheads and forearms pressed to the glass in Boschean disarray – giving the inside of the bus, in fact, the atmosphere and miasma of a tube carriage. Yes, us lucky corporate lackeys got all the jam-packed chin-in-armpit close-discomfort of a tube journey with none of its relative speed and efficiency, as well as all the inch-by-inch frustration of a bus journey with none of the ability to sit down and not feel quite so much like a herd of cattle headed for the abbatoir. There were, I noticed, far fewer robotic announcements of the next stop. Presumably their irritant effect would have driven us into an auto-immolating frenzy.

I reached home, again ninety minutes later than usual, sticky, sore, exhausted and in no mood to do anything other than silently fume. And you know what? Good.

Strikes aren’t supposed to be a picnic. It does a daughter of toil good to be reminded, in an age of ‘human resources’, ‘downsizing’ and ‘natural wastage’, that the City can still be brought to its knees by the flexed muscles of the proletarian vanguard. If the whole of London is visibly and audibly inconvenienced, regrettably including you and I? Job done. That’s what workforces are meant to be able to do. That’s what unions are for. Think about the petty and grand disagreements you have with your place or system of work, and imagine if you could do that.

The press have, unsurprisingly, heaped acrimony on the RMT. It’s a saddening indictment of the past two decades’ anti-worker policy and rhetoric in media and government that this line has been so readily swallowed. Letters to editors, vox pops and actually speaking to those around you gather the same impression, based on a rejection or conceptual ignorance of solidarity with fellow workers, a view of society that pits one section of the workforce against others and an assumption that inconvenience to the individual is the gravest possible injury. Some common anti-RMT straw-men, then, which all blusteringly miss the point:

‘Train drivers are on £36K already, what are they complaining about?’ Yes. And the national average wage is less than half of that. Why aren’t the rest of us on £36K? Haven’t we got unions to go to?

‘How can they ask for job security in a recession?’ Why shouldn’t they, and why shouldn’t we? Why can’t we all request protection commensurate to our service and commitment to a company, instead of bowing to the destructive whims of a system that got us into this mess in the first place?

‘Why should the RMT get special treatment?’ They shouldn’t, and they’re not arguing that they should. We should be levelling up, not down, to a point where wages and conditions are at the highest common denominator rather than the lowest.

Solidarity makes sense. It’s surely no secret by now that capitalism is run for the few at the expense of the many. Unions were formed to make some attempt at redressing the system’s glaring unfairness. Over the last century, unions were instrumental in protecting and improving the conditions of the exploited and economically weak. They have historically been intertwined with the promotion of equality and civil rights. As UK unions have been systematically defanged by successive governments, so protection from exploitation has been undermined or disregarded. Unions are there for you, not for some nebulous workshy bully-boy dreamed up by the Murdoch press, hardly a friend to the working man.

I’m sorry it has to be Bob Crow. I know he does the cause no favours, and may as well have been assembled from a Thuggish Seventies Throwback Starter Kit designed by the Daily Mail. I know he’s obstructive, obstreperous and throroughly unphotogenic. (The PCS’ Mark Serwotka, on the other hand, can work-to-rule me anytime.) Look on Bob Crow as the misshapen Leninist carapace from which a beautiful anarcho-syndicalist butterfly may eventually emerge, wings gleaming wetly in the sunlight of solidarity. The point is that trade unions are the best idea pissed-off workers ever had, and if more of them exercised on behalf of their members the power and control that the RMT are exhibiting, then scandals like low pay, gendered wage disparities, exploitation and sexual and racial harassment would be less of a stain on our working lives and we might find it slightly easier to get up in the mornings with more than an uninterrupted commute to look forward to.