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Emily McIlhatton
UNITE and UCU has strikes scheduled in March following plans, announced by the University of Strathclyde in 2025, to save £35 million over two years with many of the proposed savings expected to come from job cuts. These reductions can harm the quality of education and student support by increasing workloads for remaining staff and weakening the learning environment.
The UCU have said,
Despite continuous engagement from campus unions, the university leadership, led by Principal Stephen MacArthur, has not provided clear evidence explaining why the cuts are necessary or explored alternatives, and has not ruled out compulsory redundancies. Meanwhile, redundancy consultations and targeted voluntary severance offers have already begun, causing enormous stress among faculty and staff.
This page covers when the Industrial Action will occur, how to support those on strike and what the Union is doing to support those on strike.
Any adjustments impacting teaching activities will be communicated directly to you by the university, your department and/or Faculty.
If you want to show your support for faculty and staff, the UCU have created a template which you can adapt to your own needs and interests.
They advise you send any email to s.mcarthur@strath.ac.uk and principal@strath.ac.uk from your strath.ac.uk address and choose your own subject line to avoid emails going to spam.
Dear Senior Management Team (SMT) at the University of Strathclyde,
I am a [insert level and year of study] student at [school/faculty], and I wanted to take a moment to write to you about upcoming industrial action undertaken by UNITE and UCU, and to express my support for faculty and staff at our university.
As you might understand, students are in a very difficult position with regards to strikes: our families and we are making an enormous personal sacrifice to pay for education which is now withheld from us. I am deeply concerned about the upcoming strikes' impact on my education, and am of course keen to avoid any disruption to my learning.
However, I believe that making staff who teach us redundant will affect students negatively. Staff have already been in dispute with the university and the sector over large workloads – they deserve to be treated with fairness and dignity, and given more time and space to focus on the education they provide to us. Instead, the university is cutting the number of staff and compromising our experience of classroom instruction, supervision and pastoral care.
I therefore believe that the best way to avoid disruption from industrial action is for the Strathclyde Senior Management Team to engage in meaningful negotiation and reach an agreement with the campus unions so that the strikes can be called off. To this effect, as a student and member of this community, I respect the demands of the faculty members and insist that the SMT takes them seriously.
I therefore write to you today to ask the Principal to use his important position to negotiate: (1) A detailed financial case for restructuring needs to be shared with campus trade unions along with any non-salary cost savings which have been explored; (2) Compulsory staff redundancies have to be ruled out; (3) All related grievances have to be resolved using the agreed grievance process.
Yours sincerely,
[name]
Tuesday 17th and Wednesday 18th March
Monday 16th until Friday 20th March
The Union won't be picketed and will remain open during the strikes and to show our support for those on strike, we will:
Myplace has a full list of frequently asked questions about the current period of Industrial Action.
We will update this page if and when any further information is released. You can view the latest UCU update on their website.