The universities sector is in a crisis which won’t be resolved without national and coordinated action of the concerned unions, report higher-education workers in Counterfire

Unions representing higher-education workers, including UCU, Unite, EIS and Unison, are balloting their members against the employers’ paltry pay offer of 1.4%. Given that RPI inflation is currently running at 4.5%, this is yet another real-terms pay cut and another blow to the higher-education sector more generally.

While teachers, dentists and doctors have been offered 4%, nurses and midwives 3.6%, civil servants 3.25% and armed forces 4.5%, because there always appears to be an extra pot of cash for the military, university workers are at the bottom of the pile.

It’s a grim time for staff working in higher education. For years, universities spent tuition-fee income on enormous salaries for vice-chancellors, shiny new buildings and over-ambitious expansion projects but never on staff themselves who regularly received below-inflation pay offers.

Those golden years (at least for the employers) are now a distant memory for most institutions. Declining numbers of overseas students, who contribute a disproportionate amount of income, together with falling revenue from a frozen UK tuition fee and increased competition have produced a perfect storm for the university sector.

According to researchers at London Economics, 43% of institutions are expected to be in deficit in the most recent financial year while the average surplus has fallen from 6.1% in 2018-19 to just 0.5% in 2023-24. A fifth of universities had less than thirty days of liquidity – cash to pay staff and run their operations – while seventeen institutions reported zero liquidity days.

The pain is not spread evenly. Thanks to the deregulation of student numbers, universities in the ‘elite’ Russell Group are now able to recruit huge cohorts, hoovering up students who might previously have gone elsewhere. Meanwhile, just ten universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, account for 42% of total net current assets, revealing a two-tier sector.

This precarious financial situation has led the employers to slash jobs with some 12,000 job cuts in the last year alone. The higher-education regulator is even preparing for some universities to go bankrupt in what it disgracefully calls ‘market exit’.

Instead of dipping into reserves (or slashing senior staff pay), universities have reacted to this uncertainty by doing what they always do: making staff pay for a crisis that they didn’t cause.

Edinburgh University, for example, has announced £140m in cuts and up to 1,800 redundancies even though it has reserves of over £3 billion. On a smaller scale, the University of Hertfordshire, which had a £17.3 million surplus in its most recent accounts and some £90m in cash reserves, recently imposed a 50% increase in campus parking charges as well as removing confidentiality from staff appraisals.

And now the government has published a white paper on post-16 education which will do nothing to address the roots of this crisis. Instead it shifts responsibility onto students by increasing tuition fees and instructs universities to pursue ‘specialisation and collaboration in teaching and research’. This effectively means restricting research funding to more elite universities and sanctioning mergers between institutions in the same cities in order to achieve what they call ‘efficiencies’.

At a time when the university sector has been traumatised by the unleashing of market forces (and students ravaged by rising levels of debt), it has the gall to argue that ‘healthy competition must remain part of the system’.

National fightback needed

University staff haven’t taken any of this lying down. Dozens of institutions have taken industrial action over the last few years in response to management attacks on pay and conditions.

UCU members at Newcastle University took 44 days of strike action in the spring against the threat of 300 redundancies and won a guarantee of no compulsory job cuts this academic year. Members of the EIS at the University of the West of Scotland have just won a similar guarantee of no compulsory redundancies after eight days of strike action.

Meanwhile, workers at a number of universities including Dundee, Leicester and Nottingham are all currently involved in disputes over redundancies that demonstrate a resilience not to back down in the face of management attacks. The UCU has a list of the current campaigns against cuts to further and higher education that goes all the way from Bangor to the Working Men’s College. Similarly, UCU members at Queen Mary host a regularly updated ‘UKHE shrinking’ page that helpfully provides a summary of current disputes.

However, while there is potential for organised opposition to cuts at a local level, the appetite for national action appears to be less certain. Members are understandably concerned about the broader economic situation and are feeling vulnerable in the face of aggressive management actions. There is also a residual lack of confidence in the ability of the respective union leaderships to fight consistently and with accountability to defend jobs and working conditions.

In this situation, it is going to take a major effort both to reach the 50% threshold in the ballot and to secure a majority to take meaningful industrial action. But this is our only option, as even successful local disputes won’t address the more fundamental fault lines in higher-education funding that are behind the sustained attack on pay and conditions.

There is a clear political dimension to this crisis: we’ve had years of government praising the role of the country’s ‘world-class university system’ while refusing to fund it properly and leaving the sector to the mercy of the market. The UCU’s general secretary, Jo Grady, is right to point out that the government earlier this year, ‘introduced emergency powers, recalled parliament and provided the funding necessary to save 2,700 jobs [at] British Steel.’ There now has to be a huge push to demand a similar investment in our universities.

So there is little alternative other than to leaflet campus offices, libraries and canteens and to organise lively ‘Get the Vote Out’ campaigns that tie national issues to local concerns in order to win the ballot. We need to use the energy that saw significant numbers of university staff join recent marches opposing, for example, the genocide in Gaza and the mobilisations of the far right.

This week, around 100 people attended a national cross-union reps’ meeting to discuss the pay ballots. The meeting addressed the wider context of a crisis in higher education and spoke of the real potential for joint campaigning and striking to turn the tide of the employers’ attacks. At the moment, it seems that what campaigning there is has been confined to individual unions but there was a real mood expressed at the meeting to change this and to organise more collectively. A summary report of the meeting is to be produced and a follow-up meeting to be convened in the next two weeks.

The crisis in higher education won’t go away by itself; only concerted action across campuses and across unions can defend jobs and secure a higher-education system accessible to all.