University strikes are something we need to pay attention to – it’s a fight about how all of us want to live

Ivividly remember the first time I met a university professor. I was a home help, and he needed my care during what would, sadly, be the last months of his life. I recall it well because it was a different kind of experience for me. I was a teenage mum from a working-class background. I was used to authority figures telling me what to do, but he spoke to me as an equal — not seeing me as a scally off the council estate.

Our experiences seemed very different to me at the time. I was on poverty pay as a home carer, on what would now be called a zero-hours contract. As a trade union rep, I fought for years against the privatisation of our work and the demand from bosses to have it done on the cheap. Too often we were paid for hourly or even half-hourly slots, and left unwaged for travel in between, or for any extra time it took to help one of those we cared for.

I was proud that I negotiated a pioneering agreement with a Labour council when I was a Unison shop steward; one that saw my fellow carers receive their own formal education. As a result, we graduated with foundation degrees and got better pay and terms to match. Above all, there was now a more qualified workforce delivering a better standard of care.

Education ended up being a connection between me and that professor. It’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about the power of free education to improve all our lives and the society we share.

Today, that university professor might have found that the conditions I talked to him about — impossible workloads, insecure contracts and wages that don’t cover the bills — applied to him as much as me. Conditions for those who were once better-off are now themselves being driven down.

That’s why today’s professors — and for that matter lab technicians, librarians, lecturers, and other university staff — are now the ones going on strike.

The University and College Union (UCU) reports that pay has fallen by a fifth since the Tories came to power in 2010. Fewer than a third of university researchers are on permanent contracts and many of those teaching classes are casual workers — paid, as we were, by the hour. And the erosion of their pensions means they are effectively facing a long-term – as well as short-term – pay cut.

The causes are similar to those I faced, and so are the consequences.

I know what it meant to raise a child while holding down an insecure job on an inadequate wage, and the impact it had on family life. The impact isn’t equal either.

The social care workforce was overwhelmingly female and disproportionately ethnic minority; I never thought it was a coincidence we were collectively underpaid. There are stark gender and racial pay gaps among university staff, and casualisation will only worsen them.

In social care, I saw what was behind the constant demands for staff to do more for less, and the lower quality of care that resulted, and I see the same now in higher education.

In both cases, services that should be delivered for the public good have been driven down in the pursuit of private profit.

Free market experiments have clearly failed for those who provide and receive these services alike.

That’s why, as shadow education secretary, I’ve joined UCU members taking action this month — and why I want education to be provided as a public service.

But it goes wider than just education. This is a dispute, not just over the terms and conditions of higher education staff, but the terms and conditions under which we all want to work and live — and a fight not just for those on the picket line, but all of us in politics too.