UEA UCU has called nine days of strike action, to begin from Thursday 1st May 2025. Action will continue on the 2nd, 6th, 7th, 9th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th of May.
The union is in dispute with the University of East Anglia (UEA) management on three key issues – (1) To remove the threat of compulsory redundancies, (2) financial accountability, and (3) transparent governance. After a day of action in March, members voted to escalate industrial action to stop compulsory redundancies.
Since the cuts were announced in November, nearly 500 hundred lecturers and professional services staff have been “at risk” of redundancy. The university sought to make 192 roles redundant (equivalent to 163 full time staff). Since the start of this process, hundreds have agreed to take voluntary redundancy, been redeployed into other roles or have resigned Consequently, the number of full time equivalent (FTE) roles left at risk is less than 10 (with nearly 30 individuals remaining at risk).
The Union has worked closely with management to improve the voluntary redundancy scheme, to increase the number of roles available in redeployment and has suggested a range of financial alternatives that would offset these cuts to staff. We have engaged in this process in good faith and with a mind to ensure that UEA makes good on its public promise that compulsory redundancies are a “last resort”.
Now that the remaining cuts represent less than 0.25% of the University’s budget, a figure less than half of the current salaries paid to the 11 members of the Executive team (p. 55), we believe there is a moral, financial, and strategic rationale for removing the threat of redundancy from those colleagues who remain at risk. We have given management a number of opportunities to discuss this process with us and even scheduled an emergency meeting of our branch on the 30th April to ensure that action could be postponed or called off if the threat of redundancy was removed and the University committed publicly to progress on the other two aspects of our dispute.
It is with grave disappointment and anger that we are on strike. Compulsory redundancies would be a new low in the history of our institution and it is not one that we can accept in good conscience, particularly when the financial argument for the remaining cuts is no longer valid. Since the first wave of cuts was announced in January 2023, the UEA has paid more to its various Vice Chancellors than it is proposing to save from these remaining redundancies.
We are not denying the real financial difficulties that UEA finds itself in, but believe that compulsory redundancies are, and should always be, a “last resort”. That is why UCU has proposed a range of alternative financial measures that would save more than three times the remaining pay savings. These were rejected at an earlier stage of this process, and we are disappointed that they are not being revisited in light of the savings already made.
These cuts will end careers and livelihoods. Despite the Vice Chancellor telling the BBC in October 2024 that “we don’t think that staff and students will notice” the proposed £11 million in staff cuts (3% of the UEA’s budget), we know the emotional, physical, and financial impact that this process has had on hundreds of staff members at the institution. We will continue to work tirelessly for the students who we are here to teach and support, but this commitment requires stability, security, and resource.
We have made clear to management that, unlike their approach to compulsory redundancies, our escalating action is a “last resort”. We are ready, and very willing, to end industrial action if our very reasonable demands are met. We are calling everyone associated with UEA to ask the VC and the UEA’s Executive team to do the right thing and to end the threat of compulsory redundancy.