“An injury to one is an injury to all” is the motto of Brighton, Hove and District Trades Union Council.

The classic call for worker solidarity relies on employees in different industries or firms recognising they share a common interest in each other’s rights.

It was under this banner that hundreds of people demonstrated on Saturday, with a “March For Jobs” to oppose cutbacks and redundancies across the city.

Estimates of the number of people who took part ranged from the police’s 450 to an optimistic 700.

Nevertheless, organisers proclaimed it the biggest demo of its kind for 20 years.

They took heart from the interest shown by students – many of whom were involved in protests at the University of Sussex last week – in the wider context of threatened public service cuts.

There was a genuine sense, too, of people identifying their own problems with those of people in different workplaces.

One protester saw threats to nursery facilities as a wider attack on women in work; another, from the University of Brighton, saw job losses at the University of Sussex as the “thin end of the wedge”.

Nursery staff, lecturers and students rubbed shoulders with binmen, civil servants and even representatives of British Airways cabin crews, bringing a series of separate disputes into focus as a single issue.

There is no doubt unrest is likely to grow during the next few years.

The soaring national debt cause by the bank bail out led the three main parties into an unsightly bidding war at party conferences last year, as each attempted to outdo the other with pledges of swingeing or “savage” cuts to the public sector.

For public servants, though, the recession has largely yet to hit home.

While thousands of jobs have gone in the private sector, the fallout has yet to be felt by people working for councils or Government departments.

The gloves, though, are shortly to come off.

Brighton and Hove City Council is expecting to have to shed 150 jobs, and Sussex Police has set out the need to cut scores of officer and staff posts.

Job centre staff, tax workers, coastguards and court staff are due to strike today and tomorrow against what the Public and Commercial Services Union sees as attempts to make it cheaper to axe jobs further down the line.

When it comes to open protest and resistance to cuts, though, will the unions be able to gather more public support than was evident on Saturday? The trades union council is made up of unions representing 20,000 workers in the city.

The number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance in Brighton and Hove rose by 1,670 in 2009 and hundreds more job losses are planned.

These bald figures would suggest that hundreds of people whose jobs the march was held to defend stayed at home – and thousands more whose interests were supposedly being represented did the same.

One difficulty may be the adherence to old dogma and slogans which, in the post-Thatcher era, many in the workforce will simply not recognise or agree with.

Examples of chants among marchers on Saturday demonstrate this.

“No ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts” is straightforward and to the point.

“Brighton united will never be defeated” may have confused Albion fans fearful of a new rival, but is a fairly simple call for solidarity.

“Stop the workers being betrayed, solidarity and mutual aid” is a less catchy, more technical and much more old-fashioned cry to hear in the heart of Brighton but at least chimed with the aims of the event itself.

Other slogans may be less likely to win supporters to the cause.

“The rich, the rich, we’ve got to get rid of the rich” is possibly unattractive to workers whose jobs are under threat.

One, two, three, four, escalate the class war; five, six, seven, eight, organise and smash the state” no doubt warmed the cockles of the hardliners on the march but the vast majority of people are unlikely to share those ambitions.

Indeed, smashing the state would probably not guarantee the job security people in the public sector crave.

“Students, and workers, unite and fight” may be the most significant chant – and proved the most popular even at the fag-end of the rally.

Conjuring images of 1968 Paris, it reflected an ability by those marching to identify the budget cuts causing university job losses with those leading to other cuts elsewhere in the public sector.

Do these slogans or arguments ring any bells, though, with the modern workforce? Thousands of people work in small businesses with a handful of non-union staff.

They live with the insecurity that if their firmgoes down, they go down with it, and many have been prepared to take pay cuts, delayed wages or pay freezes to help the business survive.

To them, public sector workers with nine to five jobs and decent pensions are insulated from the bite of harsh economic winds.

The unions were left behind by Labour – no Labour councillors were represented on the platform on Saturday.

In Brighton, it is the Green party which occupies what was formerly “socialist” ground.

The unions retain the ability to cause substantial disruption, as this week’s strikes may show, but do they still have a voice in mainstream political debate? In the age orTwitter, podcasts, text messages and flashmobs, no political organiser can afford to be a technophobe – yet one union branch secretary did not know her own mobile phone number on Saturday and a key organiser of the event does not even own one.

In a future of upheaval for thousands of workers and industrial disputes, strikes and collective bargaining may be back in the foreground – but it will be the politics of 2010, not 1979, that win the day.