Imperial College staff to begin strike action over real-terms pay cuts

Staff at Imperial College London have begun four days of strike action today (25 November) in a dispute over pay, with the University and College Union (UCU) claiming the institution has imposed a real-terms cut while pressing ahead with major capital spending.

The full strike days will run from Tuesday 25 to Friday 28 November, with pickets at the South Kensington and White City campuses from 8.30am to 10.30am. UCU said further action is planned from 1 to 12 December if the college does not return to negotiations.

Members of the three recognised unions – UCU, Unison and Unite – have already taken six days of action this term after rejecting a below-inflation 2% pay offer. Imperial, one of the wealthiest universities in the UK, is developing a £2bn capital programme.

The union said Imperial had acknowledged that its original pay proposal was based on miscalculated figures, but maintained that pay still sat above salary benchmarks. It added that management had allowed the outcome of a previous benchmark review to be misrepresented. While the review recommended a significant uplift, it was reworded to claim that “the benchmarks used for all job families… were appropriate”.

UCU said that during talks, management proposed extending enhanced paternity pay. When unions noted this would give fathers more paid leave than mothers, and that maternity pay should therefore rise, Imperial instead reduced shared parental leave for fathers.

UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: “Imperial staff will once again down tools this week because they refuse to accept a real-terms pay cut while university management freely spends billions of pounds elsewhere.

“The mistakes Imperial management is making, to avoid giving staff what they deserve, will have serious consequences. The Provost must stop misrepresenting a salary review, which clearly concluded that pay needs to rise, as a reason to suppress wages and return to the negotiating table with a meaningful offer.”

President of Imperial UCU, Vijay Tymms, added: “Members are furious that after first failing to check their calculations, we now find senior management has behaved in such an underhand way. When this review was first announced, we were told that our input would ‘help shape the principles to inform our decisions’. Nobody thought those decisions would include rewriting the recommendations of the review.”