Monday June 9th 2025
Edinburgh University, Bristo Square
Written by Midlothian View Reporter, Liam Eunson
Edinburgh University staff have announced they will take strike action on the 20th of June due to a £140 million budget cut with a £90 million cut to staff wages due to the University predicting a future financial deficit.
They proposed to cut £140 million over an 18-month period that would extremely affect the universities staff forcing a strike due to staff facing a loss of jobs and enormously expanded workloads due to redundancies.
The strikes will consist of a walk out on the 20th of June followed by a five day strike at the start of the university academic year in September. The five day strike will take place during the universities ‘welcome week’ that gives future students an opportunity to see the university upon arrival.
With Edinburgh University being the largest landlord in the city and having large financial reserves, they are not currently in a deficit but are taking action due to predicting that they will be. This has caused many staff and union board members across the university to take action against dangers to employment.
Sophia Woodman, the Edinburgh President for the University’s and Colleges Union, explained, “They want to cut £90 million from the budget for staff salaries which is significantly more than they actually spend on staff. These cut’s will fall disproportionately on staff. Over many months our joint unions have analysed the university finances and found they have very ample and enormous reserves.”
“Staff is a major cost for the university but staff are the ones that make everything happen and bring in most of their income in terms of teaching and research. Without the staff, there is no university. “
Cutting staff wages affect the teaching and research values at the core of the university with previous cuts already effecting teaching employment opportunities for PhD students who sometimes rely on being employed to teach for the university to pay for tuition fees.
The Edinburgh University and Colleges Union (UCU) alongside proposed walk out and 5-day strike are taking part in an action short of strike, where they will only work to their contracted hours and roles, not taking on an additional workload and not taking on work for absent colleagues. Alongside this, the UCU have encouraged members to not co-operate in the budget cutting process.
The university senate, which is the body responsible for maintaining academic standards, asked in March for the budget cut proposal to be reconsidered because of the overall damage it would do to the core mission of the university but received no response. So in May, after months of talking, members of the union voted no confidence surrounding the proposals.
“It’s not just the union saying this, it’s many staff members across the university community”, Sophia Woodman explained, “Nobody wants to go on strike and lose pay but our members are facing job losses, so we have no choice other than go on strike and take other forms of industrial action to put pressure on the management to reconsider and for them to come back to the negotiation table and find other solutions to address what they claim is a crisis”.
Members of the Edinburgh UCU have not been informed what other areas of the university are facing the additional proposed £50 million cuts. Members believe the university spends too much on buying, building and renovating buildings.
The recent university construction project, ‘Edinburgh Futures Institute’, was originally proposed to cost £140 million backed by government funding but after completion was said to have cost £250 million, effecting transparency amongst staff and unions alongside effecting the university’s financial reserves.
Sophia Woodman highlighted, “There are lots of budget cuts already on-going, we think there is a lot more the university could be doing to think about reducing expenditure through eliminating enormous amounts of bureaucratic procedures that are involved in procurement. There is a lot of wasteful spending.”
With the walk out on the 20th of June and the action short of strike procedure, a 5-day strike period will take place during the Universities ‘welcome week’ at the beginning of the new academic year. Striking during an important week in university enrollment was chosen to create maximum leverage and maximum visibility, affecting new students from benefiting from welcome week activities, such as open days.
“Our members don’t want to go on strike”, Sophia highlighted, “What we will be saying is, we love this university, we want to teach future students but we need the conditions to do that. We are still not convinced based on the information we have received that these extreme measures are needed”.
Putting pressure on the management to reconsider the cuts, the strikes taking place are an attempt to save jobs and force the university to consider an agreement to no compulsory redundancies for a set period of time. The unions issue with the cuts is the pace of reducing spending and the proposal to cut spending in a short period of time even though claiming the university is not in immediate deficit. The Edinburgh UCU stated that if they do not receive a response from management they will be balloting their members again in September and getting a mandate for further industrial action in the next academic year.
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