Five unions in Higher Education (UCU, Unison, Unite, GMB, and EIS) are balloting members to gain a mandate for industrial action. But what does that mean for students?

You will have heard that UCU, the University and College Union, will ballot for industrial action. The questions below should help to give some information about what we already know this means. Keep an eye on our Instagram for a more visual digest (such as these infographics from 2022). And together with the Queen Mary Community Solidarity group, we made this booklet with information about industrial action, and an informative booklet about trade unions in general.

  1. What is going to happen?
  2. What is industrial action at university?
  3. Will there definitely be industrial action?
  4. What is the dispute about?
  5. Who benefits from successful strikes?
  6. Can QMUL staff really influence this dispute?
  7. Why does this affect students?
  8. Can students do anything?

What is going to happen?

Five unions in Higher Education are opening ballots to gain a mandate for industrial action from their members. There are multiple steps until we get to the point of industrial action.

  1. Ballot opening: ballots run for a couple of weeks to ensure members have a chance to inform themselves and post their physical ballot.
  2. Gain mandate: only if enough members vote and if they vote in support of industrial action does the union have a mandate for action. Rules introduced by Tory governments have made this very difficult, introducing a threshold of 50% voter turnout and solely through postal votes.
  3. Announce Industrial Action: if the union gains the mandate, we have to announce forms and dates for action well in advance of the actual action.
  4. Take Industrial Action: when a mandate is obtained, it is live for six months, during which members can take industrial action.

Gaining a mandate for action is to show university managements that staff is serious that the current working conditions are unsustainable, and that the redundancies and course closures require a national response. Employers have the opportunity to negotiate meaningfully. They are the ones who can stave off disruption. 

What is industrial action at university?

Industrial Action is a collective agreement to organise among employees as a way to compel a powerful employer to negotiate, usually as a position of last resort after conventional attempts at negotiation have failed. Striking is lawful. Historically, strikes have played a major role in securing workers’ rights, safe working conditions, and fair rates of pay in many kinds of employment around the world – as the booklet created by the QMUL Community Solidarity group explains clearly.

Industrial Action can take many forms:

  • When it is a strike, that means employees withdraw all labour and lose all pay the time they are on strike. For students, this will be most visible in teaching activities not taking place. But UCU’s membership also includes librarians, technicians, administrators and other university staff, so various other activities are also affected. 
  • Industrial Action can also be ‘Action Short of a Strike’ (ASOS), which includes working to contract (most  UCU members normally work well beyond the full-time hours they are paid for), not covering for absent colleagues. As this is working to contract, that should not affect pay, but in previous years at QMUL, Senior Management has imposed a policy of 100% pay deductions, indefinitely, for ASOS. That meant that staff was threatened they would not be paid if they work strictly the hours their contract says they should work. (This is a legal grey area and staff is addressing this in employment tribunals and county courts, read more here if you’re interested) 
  • Another form of ASOS is the refusal to mark assessments. The ‘marking boycott’ threatened graduation and shut down progression in the summer of 2022. QMUL management could not ignore workers’ calls for negotiation this way, and for the first time in years they engaged meaningfully with staff.

Will there definitely be industrial action?

The point of calling a ballot and announcing planned strike action is to put pressure on the employers to negotiate when they are refusing to do so. Union organisers will typically suspend or cancel a strike action if the employer shows signs of negotiating constructively. The ideal outcome is that this happens early enough to avoid the strike completely.

Unfortunately, in recent previous disputes with UCU, the employers’ representatives have followed a hardline policy of refusing to engage, resulting in large numbers of days lost to strike action.

What is the dispute about?

The dispute ties together three major problems that are fundamentally reshaping the nature of higher education in the UK. Some of them have been long-lasting, some of them have become acute in recent years. The dispute is based on the 2025/26 joint Higher Education trade union national claim, specifically:

  1. A pay uplift that is at least RPI + 3.5% or £2,500, whichever is the higher, on all pay points. Rates of pay have fallen steadily in real terms and are now worth around three-quarters of their 2009 value. This makes embarking on a career in universities the privilege of the independently wealthy.
  2. The protection of national agreements relating to terms and conditions of employment, including the 2004 framework agreement, the Post-92 contract for Post-92 institutions, and HE2000.
    • Staff in many universities are being pressured to move to worse contracts, including contracts with worse protections, representations, and pensions.
    • These pressures come on top of a climate of casualisation. Many staff are living on precarious, short-term contracts and often don’t know in the summer whether they’ll have an income in September. 
    • Workload and working conditions, with a focus on manageable hours and reducing levels of stress and ill health. Spiralling workloads and out-of-balance staff-student-ratios mean students in 2025 do not receive the kind of attention and education staff would want to provide and which they were able to provide a mere couple of years ago. This is further exacerbated by the job losses and cuts covered in the third demand of the claim.
  3. National agreement to avoid redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines across the sector. There are now over 100 universities making redundancies, and that is not counting the stealth redundancies of fixed-term contracts not being renewed — and remaining staff having to carry the workload. We need a national-level response to this, as our sector and consequently the future of education and research is being hollowed out unthinkingly by all these individual cuts.

Who benefits from successful strikes?

In short: everyone. The university as a whole would improve by engaging meaningfully with the collective unions’ proposals. The five unions — UCU as well as Unison, Unite, GMB, and EIS — want to ensure we maintain universities in the UK, not destroy them through mismanagement. Concretely, university life would be improved in the following ways:

  • We’d put an end to the thoughtless cuts to programmes and disciplines. Currently, without any overarching plan, each University Senior Management is making short-sighted cuts to staff and programmes. This results in disciplinary ‘cold spots’ across the country (there are entire regions where students won’t be able to study particular disciplines at all as this British Academy report outlines), and jeopardising regional access to Higher Education — and thus socio-economic disadvantages, as not everyone can travel to another city let alone county to go to university. We need protection against these cuts to safeguard the future of higher education and research in this country.
  • Universities would be more inclusive and representative of the population at large and student body in particular. The current real-term pay cuts and pension cuts mean that soon only the independently wealthy will be able to afford to work in higher education. This would undo the years of work that staff and student groups have spent attempting to democratise universities. Fighting these cuts is to prevent entire groups from being excluded from participating in Higher Education, either as workers or students. Higher Education should be open to workers from all backgrounds, not in the least because students deserve and need to see themselves and society represented. Unison, who at QMUL represent cleaners, porters, library staff, maintenance, and many other departments that keep the university afloat, is also balloting members to undertake action in support of these proposals. In the past, collaboration between UCU and Unison has led to important improvements, such as the realisation that QMUL had been dramatically underpaying the London Living Wage for years, in particular affecting the pay of those in the lowest pay band. Thanks to collective action, there is improvement, but the pay is still not enough, nor the historic injustice addressed.
  • Workload would be sustainable, and learning conditions improve. To secure tuition fees, universities have increased student recruitment exponentially, while the number of secure contracts have not grown in the same line. The spiralling student-staff ratio results in staff not having the capacity nor time to ensure students receive the attention which staff would like to give them, which students mere years ago did get, and which students had been promised as they registered. Manageable workloads mean adequate attention to students’ development, assignments, wellbeing, and futures.  
  • Putting a halt to the creeping casualisation and precarity is needed to ensure graduate students and Teaching Associates stop spending entire summers worrying about whether or not they’ll have any teaching in September, let alone pay. The revolving door of short-term contracts harms students. Teachers on more secure contracts support students developing educational relationships with their teachers in the long term and ensure their access to teachers’ expertise is not dependent on the caprices of (non-)renewal of short-term contracts.

Can QMUL staff really influence this dispute?

Yes, because the Senior Manager of Queen Mary is on the key national boards. The Principal, Colin Bailey, sits on the boards of Universities UK (UUK) and of Universities & Colleges Employers Association (UCEA). The former is the body that has to negotiate to restore pensions, and the latter is the body that should take seriously a detailed claim submitted by higher education unions (not only UCU).

The Principal has made QMUL a focal point in UK Higher Education industrial relations. QMUL was the first to impose draconian and punitive deductions on staff for Action Short of Strike — we are still questioning its legality. That brought QMUL to the attention of the national press and politicians, a spotlight no member of staff sought but which now means our local situation shapes the national one.

In recent years, thanks to dedicated industrial action, ucu members put an end to an unconscionable cut to their pensions. The pension scheme (USS) had tried to slash pensions by roughly 35-50% based on a valuation of the fund from March 2020, when the world had crashed. Members have been challenging this sham slashing in multiple ways, including via courts, but USS had refused to reverse its cuts. It’s the dedicated action by staff in all forms that resulted in its restoration.

Why does this affect students?

Students are at the heart of the university, and whatever we do to try to improve university will affect students. And staff has already been doing a lot of work to prevent students from feeling the worst of the impact of managerial and governmental decisions, but that is not tenable.

The UCU view is that the quality of the student learning experience is already badly affected, nationwide, by the problems we’re trying to address, with stressed, underpaid and precarious staff often teaching to excessively large classes amid dysfunctional underresourced and outsourced administrative systems. We cannot give the support we want to give.

Unfortunately, it’s clear from long experience that university employers do not acknowledge staff’s alarm cries about unworkable working conditions and the elitist university that’s being created. Only disruption – or the threat of disruption – to teaching or assessment has helped bring employers to talk. No union member wants to disrupt students’ education, but we are left with no other remaining option.

Since we have not been able to achieve meaningful dialogue any other way, we now believe that effective industrial action is the best path to achieving lasting improvements to both the working conditions of staff and the learning conditions of students, this cohort and future cohorts.

Can students do anything?

We all, staff as well as students, want to either avoid industrial action, or, if needed, make it as short as possible. In previous years, the Principal has tried to turn staff and students against each other to demoralise staff. QMUL even resorted to inticing students to report on the action of their own teachers. 

As students in previous years put it: ‘My message to staff involved in the strikes is to not back down. […] My message to senior management at Queen Mary is about as straightforward as it gets: look around you. The staff are the university.’ – read the full The Print article here.

Students showing solidarity with staff and engaging in rethinking the university sends the strongest sign to university managers that they cannot let this drag out but rather have to negotiate with the people who make the university run. In recent years, students have helped in various ways, including:

With enormous thanks to UCU members at the University of Manchester who shared the template that forms the basis of this blogpost.