IN TUC conference week much of the talk will revolve around low pay and the curse of zero-hours contracts — and rightly so. 

Since day one of the Con-Dem government, employers have been positively encouraged to put the lid firmly on any pay increases and demand massive flexibility with their staff, to the point where workers are no longer employed directly but through agencies in many cases. 

Sacked on a whim, laid off on the spot for a week or two, scrambling for any extra hours the employer has to offer is now common. 

Even the Tories’ own manipulated figures on the economy are showing a skewed “recovery,” yet the door remains firmly closed at the whisper of any pay increases for the workers. 

Four years have passed with pay for ordinary people plummeting, despite big bonuses for the bankers, while austerity has virtually broken the backs of the poorest.

Those most bearing the brunt are women. Successive governments have pushed women to the brink, pressing them to make a swift return to work after the birth of a child. Economic forces have removed a woman’s right of choice to work flexible hours or take a few years to stay at home and care for her child should she wish. 

Single mothers have been vilified and there’s been a pernicious culling and freezing of child benefit at a time when it is needed more than ever.

We have ended up with a situation where nurseries have become day-care warehouses for babies under two, while mum desperately tries to find work that will cover the bills, let alone provide a few luxuries like holidays. 

It’s all very well if the woman is a high-flyer and can afford nannies or an au pair help, but the majority of us cannot. 

On top of this, although in theory a woman can request flexible working hours to care for a disabled child or elderly relative, in practice employers do not want an employee who may have to leave work at a moment’s notice. 

Being female under this Con-Dem government has meant hardship on every front and none more so than on pay.

Two in five part-time jobs in Britain pay less than the living wage. However a recent TUC survey in north-west England revealed that in Pendle, Lancashire, three in five women — 61.5 per cent — are paid below the living wage. There is a 34 per cent part-time gender pay gap. 

A toxic mix of zero-hours or ridiculously low-hours contracts like four or seven hours a week only add to the problem. In an effort to combine caring with work, women will often take any low-paid factory work or supermarket job to make ends meet. 

Pressure is being mounted by unions to see councils adopt the living wage and this is having some success. 

But let’s get into the private-sector companies and show them the benefits of both the living wage but also living hours and employing staff directly. 

Without stable employment on a living wage, women and all workers face a future of slave labour.

A new generation of young women are emerging from school having spent the last four years perhaps watching their own parents struggle on low pay — a new generation of women who think zero hours, low pay and no workplace rights is the “norm.” 

We have to work fast to change that narrative. There will be many women who go into successful careers, but there will be many who will shift between one low-paid job to another and this government has so far been successful at brainwashing people into thinking that this is their lot in life — a zero-hours low-paid job where renting a house is beyond them. 

We cannot allow David Cameron and co to have this kind of blanket power across the working class. 

We need to empower women and all young people through education in schools that it is a basic human right that a living wage and living hours are theirs to demand from employers. 

When they feel too vulnerable to stand up to an employer, as a member of a trade union, they have the right to representation. Education is the key.

The concept of in-work poverty has been alarmingly slowly absorbed and acknowledge. 

When a woman returns home from work in a low-paid, unskilled, zero-hours job she often then has to turn to household chores and caring duties. 

Having the time and strength to campaign against in-work poverty eludes her. 

That is why it is absolutely imperative we campaign within our unions and take to the streets in demonstrations to show society and employers and companies we are not prepared to accept low pay and less than the living wage and living hours. 

A Labour government post-2015 must also put an end to in-work poverty and Ed Miliband has pledged to free us of the scourge of routine zero-hours contracts. A mandatory living wage would be the cherry on the cake. Let’s do it.

Bernadette Horton blogs at mumvausterity.blogspot.co.uk