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The University and College Union has agreed eight days of strike action will start later this month
Staff will walk out at 60 universities this month after backing strike action in two ballots organised by the University and College Union.
Members of the UCU are set to go on strike for eight days from 25 November to 4 December, after voting for industrial action in a ballot over contribution changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) and a ballot on pay and conditions.
The union said staff will also carry out action short of a strike—such as working strictly to contracted hours and not rescheduling lectures cancelled because of strikes—when they return from the picket line. The Office for Students has already warned universities to be wary about breaching requirements of registration as a result of strike action.
If action is not avoided, it will be the second winter strike in two years after staff walked out over pension contribution increases in February 2018.
Jo Grady, general secretary of the UCU, said the “first wave of strikes” would hit universities unless employers “start talking to us seriously about how they are going to deal with rising pension costs and declining pay and conditions”.
“Any general election candidate would be over the moon with a result along the lines of what we achieved last week. Universities can be in no doubt about the strength of feeling on these issues and we will be consulting branches whose desire to strike was frustrated by anti-union laws about reballoting,” she added.
But a spokesman for vice-chancellors’ body Universities UK said the rise in pension contributions to a total of 30.9 per cent of salary was split fairly between staff and employers.
“We are hopeful that the dispute can be resolved without industrial action; but plans are in place to ensure that any potential disruption to students and staff is minimised,” the spokesman said, adding that the number of UCU members who voted for strike action “accounts for less than 10 per cent of the active membership of USS”.
He also claimed that in the pension ballot the “vast majority of branches only reached the turnout threshold of 50 per cent because of the numbers of members voting no”.
“We are committed to ensuring USS remains one of the very best pension schemes in the country, and hope that UCU will now join us to consider governance reforms and alternative options for future valuations, which deliver a shared set of principles, increased transparency and a sustainable scheme,” he added.
Overall, 46 universities out of 69 voted to strike in the pensions ballot. In the last round of industrial action in 2018, union members at 61 universities backed strike action over the USS.
In the pay ballot, 57 out of 147 chose to go on strike. Some universities were balloted on both pay and pensions, resulting in strikes at a total of 60 institutions.
A spokesperson for the Universities and Colleges Employers Association said it was “dismayed” that the UCU was asking members to take “such extensive and damaging strike action over its national pay demands” given that only 57 institutions achieved the requisite number of votes for a strike on this issue.
“Action of this kind will be damaging to students, lose UCU members money and risk undermining the collective bargaining arrangements,” he said.
“The 25,398 UCU members who voted to support strike action over pay represent just 7.8 per cent of the 325,000 employees covered by the national pay arrangements. Against a difficult backdrop employers have ensured that they have now all received an above inflation pay uplift at the minimum and many a much larger pay increase.”