Until last year Clare, 58, a care worker who has worked with elderly people for 35 years, loved her job.

She had done it all her adult life. She was good at it and earned basic money but enough to raise her family.

“Then, our local authority service was taken over by a private profit-making company,” she says.

“We were all put on zero-hours contracts overnight and on 15-minute care visits. Our wages were cut in half. I was devastated. You would get more at Tescos than a job you are doing with 35 years’ experience. It’s really sad because I love the job I do.”

Jo, 45, is a family carer, who looks after her disabled daughter Alison, who has an acute mental health problem.

Until recently, they also managed. But now the family has to pay the bedroom tax and had their council tax benefit cut, they have found themselves deep in debt.

“Last month,” Jo says, “we made our first visit to the foodbank.”

It is one of austerity’s cruellest ironies that carers — to whom society owes such a great debt — have ended up paying for a banking crisis they did nothing to cause.

As a result, it has never been harder in modern times to be a carer — either at home for a disabled family member, or as a career.

New figures released last week showed that 160,000 professional carers in the UK are now on zero-hours contracts. Meanwhile, Carers UK says that family carers have lost a staggering £1 billion in support during the past five years of Tory-led government.

The bedroom tax, council tax charges and the benefit cap have eaten into an already minimal allowance for work that saves the state an estimated £119bn a year through unpaid caring.

Everybody loses. The people being cared for by private companies, who get a constant change of carer and 15-minute visits from people they don’t know.

The disabled child at home, whose mother is forced to cut back on food or heating. The carers themselves.

The taxpayer loses from rapid growth of in-work benefits, as the state subsidises big employers.

And women, who make up the bulk of the workforce, whether in the home or in the workplace, lose most of all.

For someone like Clare, the sudden change of contract was devastating.

“I can’t stress enough how awful it is,” she says.

“When you are on a regular wage, you know your outgoings, you can budget, pay your rent and your bills, have that food. You can’t say, oh I’ll have my gas on zero hours.”

In the first week of her new contract, she was given 11 hours’ notice that she must travel in the next day for just 45 minutes’ work.

“That didn’t even pay the bus fare in,” she says.

“But you know if you say you’re not coming in for 45 minutes, they’ll just say well we can’t offer you any more work. You’re getting bullied to turn up. You’re paying to come to work.”

Clare was also no longer entitled to any sick pay.

“Considering the job I do, it’s madness,” she says. “They are worried about care home abuse, but they are abusing their care workers, and how do those care workers feel when they do their job under stress?”

Most of all, Clare felt she was no longer doing a good job.

“There’s no relationship with the service users,” she says. “In 15 minutes, you don’t have time to ask them how they like their tea. And a lot of the care you do is very personal. They might not want to show you their body.”

Recently, Jo faced a moment she had never considered in 15 years of looking after her daughter.

“We said we would never ever do this,” she says. “But we wonder if we might have to put Alison into a care home. It’s not fair on her living like this. My husband and I are skipping meals. It’s adding to her stress. It’s becoming untenable for all of us.”

In the last few months, I’ve met many carers of both kinds in foodbanks. Family carers are at their wits’ end as they struggle to balance the needs of their loved ones with money that is suddenly much, much less.

The irony is that running these kinds of households are generally much more expensive.

Sick and disabled people often need the heating on more or special food.

But I’ve also met many zero-hours care workers who simply didn’t get paid that week — or got paid far less than the cost of their transport to work, their rent and the bare minimum food they need for the table.

Clare, who recently spoke at an event organised by the TUC on zero hours, was backed by her union all the way, and won her right to go back to a normal contract.

“If it wasn’t for my union fighting my corner I would still be on them,” she says. Alison is being helped by the foodbank.

When David Cameron said the recovery wouldn’t be balanced on the backs of the poor, did he really mean carers would pay for it? These women with such broad shoulders.

Ros Wynne-Jones writes the Real Britain column for the Daily Mirror.