The University and College Union (UCU) has announced that it’s balloting members over a UK-wide strike. Over 65,000 higher education workers will be asked for their response after employers failed to improve on a paltry pay offer of 1.4%.
The news comes as new analysis from the union has shown that UK universities have planned cuts equivalent to over 15,000 jobs in the last year alone. This alarming figure represents a massive increase compared to the 5,000 proposed job cuts recorded by the UCU in March.
UCU: death by 15,000 cuts
The UCU is balloting members on demands that the higher education employers’ body – the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association (UCEA) – commits to:
a fair pay offeran agreement to stop university redundancies.protections for existing deals on terms and conditions.
All five university unions rejected the 1.4% increase their workers were offered. It represented a 3% pay cut in real terms, utterly failing to keep up with the rising cost of living.
Last week, Times Higher Education revealed that roughly 3,900 courses had been shut down from the 2024 to 2025 academic years. That’s compared to the almost 45,000 in its ‘Courses 360’ database overall. Of these cancellations, 12% were at low-tariff universities, versus 6% at medium-tariff and 5% at high-tariff institutions. In turn, this means that students who don’t do as well on their A-level grades will be far more disadvantaged by the cuts.
Staff at both of Sheffield’s major universities have already voted to strike, although no dates have been announced yet. Sheffield Hallam dropped 500 staff through voluntary severance last year, whilst also ploughing £140m into building a new city campus.
Meanwhile, the University of Edinburgh is planning 1,800 job cuts. Nottingham has already slashed 500 positions, and at Lancaster University, one in five academic staff face redundancy. UCU members at both Nottingham and Leicester are already striking against local cuts.
‘Stop looking the other way’
UCU general secretary Jo Grady stated that the UCU analysis “exposes a UK wide crisis in higher education”. She said in a press release:
These job losses are not minor, and government must stop treating them as localised incidents. Overpaid vice-chancellors are carrying out brutal cuts and have caused an existential moment for the UK higher education sector; our members do not want to strike, but they have been left with no choice but to ballot to defend it.
University bosses must protect jobs, come forward with a fair pay offer and safeguard our hard-won national agreements. Staff cannot be made to pay the price for management failures.
The UCU has invited the UCEA to help in pressuring the government to support the higher education sector. This includes demands that Labour halts its attacks on international students and stops dancing to Reform’s far-right fiddle. The government recently announced maintenance grants for low-income students – paid for by an unworkable levy on international learners.
Jo Grady pointed out the hypocrisy in Labour’s interventions:
The Labour government must also stop looking the other way. Earlier this year it rightly introduced emergency powers, recalled parliament and provided the funding necessary to save 2,700 blast furnace jobs and British Steel. Yet universities, which make up our country’s last world-leading sector and serve as economic lynchpin in post-industrial communities, are losing five times as many staff. Ministers cannot claim to be serious about national renewal while watching the crisis from the sidelines. We need intervention now.
Over ten years of attacks – both large and small – on the pay and conditions of university staff have meant that pay has been degraded against inflation by over 30% overall. This system is clearly unsustainable; something has to give.
As Grady pointed out, higher education is one of the last sectors in which the UK actually shines. It’s high time that university bosses and the government recognised that – or the workers can show them exactly what they think of their insulting offers.
Featured image via the Canary
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