Questions over how the UK’s largest university union responds to an “unprecedented” wave of job cuts are expected to come to a head as representatives debate whether to carry on with a national strike ballot over pay.

The University and College Union’s (UCU) higher education committee (HEC) appeared deeply divided ahead of a 19 February emergency meeting to discuss the future of the planned ballot, called after members voted to reject the Universities and Colleges Employers Association’s pay rise offer of between 2.5 and 5.7 per cent for 2024-25.

This decision has repeatedly been criticised by some local branches, who argue that the focus needs to be on local actions to prevent redundancies, especially after more than 1,000 job cuts have been announced in the sector in the last month alone. A narrow majority – 21 HEC members out of 40 – signed a letter calling for the meeting to discuss the timeline of the ballot amid fierce debate about whether it should go ahead at all.

Dyfrig Jones, senior lecturer in film at Bangor University and a HEC member who voted against holding a strike ballot, said some appeared to view the strikes as a chance to respond to the scale of redundancies across the sector, but he pointed out that the country’s tight trade union laws stipulate that industrial action can only be taken over a dispute with an employer, meaning that this would not be permitted.

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He said that there was a “nod and a wink” going on from some members of the HEC fighting for industrial action, adding: “[They] say ‘we’re pretending that on paper that we’re using pay as a legal mechanism for triggering national action, but really we know the issue is redundancies’. You can’t do that. You can’t go into industrial action with one stated basis and then have this implication that actually it’s about other things.”

He continued: “It’s just not a legal basis for disputes. It doesn’t matter how many of our democratic elected representatives vote for something like that. We can’t do it. It’d be straight to the courts.”

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Vivek Thuppil, also a lecturer at Bangor and fellow HEC member, has against the national strike to be discussed at the emergency meeting, which has gained more than 180 signatures. It argues that a national ballot would cost over £200,000, and Thuppil said “to waste that on a ballot that’s almost certainly going to fail is criminal”.

Thuppil highlighted that only 53 per cent of union members who participated in a consultative poll on the ballot in December – which was used to justify the strike ballot by HEC members – said that they would be prepared to take industrial action on pay, on a turnout of only 27 per cent.

This compared with 86 per cent of members who said they wanted to accept other elements of the pay offer including new terms of reference for negotiations on a pay spine review, contract types, equality pay gaps and workload. Thuppil noted that this motion has now been rejected by employers who have pulled out of negotiations. “We’re now starting at square one [on non-pay issues].”

But Rhiannon Lockley, a HEC member from Birmingham City University, said that while there were “quite specific routes” into industrial action, she saw balloting on pay as “our legal route into having industrial action as part of a wide campaign around funding”.

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She said “that isn’t a new or radical approach to campaigning on funding” and “it happens regularly across the labour movement”, including by Unison in the higher education sector.

“What we need clearly in the current context is a joint industrial and political campaign with the two things tied together. If there was an attempt just to take people out on pay, without using that as something that is a smaller part of a much bigger picture, then there wouldn’t be any point. What we need is a political and industrial campaign for the future of the sector.”

A growing number of local branches have announced strike action in recent weeks, including Newcastle University and the University of East Anglia. Sol Gamsu, past president and the current honorary treasurer of Durham University’s UCU branch, which recently won a consultative ballot on strike action and will soon be considering further action, argued that national action is now needed to back local campaigns.

“It absolutely needs a national response. And when I say national response, that can’t just mean some kind of PR campaign and a stunt. We need power. And how do you get power? You get power through having a mandate.

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“At Durham we’ve only got the consultative ballot, and we’re moving towards a formal ballot. But if we want to really push back against this in a coordinated national way, then we’re going to need a national mandate. There’s no two ways about it.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com