Many of us moved states and countries, gave up well-paying jobs or put off having children in order to train as academics here. I'm far from alone in being a graduate who survives, several years after completing my PhD, largely on the run-off from academic research and teaching grants.

All this has a very worrying impact on the quality of teaching and research at the University of Sydney. How can students expect good teaching from a lecturer who does not know if they will have any income when the semester is over? How can the public expect good research when it is performed in my share house on my beat-up laptop for 20 hours-at-a-time contracts? What is at stake in this campaign is more than working conditions and wages - it is the condition of higher education itself.

It is a difficult time for unions, and the bureaucracies at the helm of most of them are struggling to manage the rapid shifts in working life. Like in other industries, we below-the-line casual workers are not necessarily always represented by the collective at the bargaining table. Certainly this has been, at times, my experience of the NTEU. However, a union is its members. And a growing number of us who extract an income from the revolving door of casualisation have joined the present picket lines both to demand better conditions and fair remuneration for our work, and because we believe in a strong public education system.

In the words of a colleague who has been on 12-week contracts to teach undergraduates for several years now: "I'm striking because my working conditions are my students' learning conditions." Our claim for a 4 per cent pay rise does not look excessive in light of the 14 per cent salary bonuses commanded by our colleagues in management at the university.

The union members who will be on strike on Tuesday, and again on the university's August 31 Open Day, are doing so because we can all do better - not just in terms of fair pay and conditions for all staff but also in building a more secure future for our students.