May 2026: Why you should strike

Published: 20th April, 2026

Following votes at a recent General Meeting, Leicester UCU is calling a further three days of strike action during the third term (5, 11, and 18 May). This action is part of our ongoing campaign against compulsory redundancies. The strikes have been scheduled during the exam period in order to maximise their impact.

These strikes follow 28 days of action since the start of the academic year. It should go without saying that strike action comes at a cost to members, who lose pay on strike days. We have successfully argued for greater access to the national fighting fund, which provides £50 or £75 per day, depending on income, and we have also established a local fund to supplement this support. Even so, members still face a financial loss when they strike.

Nonetheless, we believe that taking this action is right. This position has been upheld repeatedly by members through recent ballots and General Meetings.

What have we achieved in 2025–26?

Following a successful ballot and subsequent member votes, we called extensive strike action in the first term of the 2025–26 academic year.

We were not able to prevent the full closure of Film Studies or Modern Languages. Nor have we yet been able to stop some staff losing their jobs as part of:

• the merger of Geography, Geology and the Environment (GGE) with Chemistry, or
• the restructuring of College Operations and Technical and Research Infrastructure Services (TRIS).

This does not mean the strike action was futile.

Senior managers will never acknowledge that our action changed outcomes. For obvious reasons, they prefer to claim that strikes are irrelevant. We do not accept this view.

Our action became a powerful organising tool. It made opposition to the redundancy programme visible, mobilised student support, and attracted solidarity from others, including our local MP, who joined lobbying efforts. It also gave greater confidence to some middle managers to question the programme and speak out. Crucially, it disrupted normal university operations, which is why the Executive repeatedly asked us not to strike.

In concrete terms, the pressure applied through our strike action achieved the following:

• We stopped redundancy programmes from being launched in History and in the School of Education. While a small number of staff in each area are leaving through voluntary redundancy, this retreat prevents dozens more from facing compulsory redundancy.
• We reduced staffing cuts elsewhere during the consultation processes. For example, we successfully pushed for:
  • increased temporary staff retention during teach-outs in Modern Languages and Human Geography,
  • changes to the GGE/Chemistry proposal that delayed its implementation, buying crucial time to challenge decisions,
  • a broadening of the range of research areas in which staff in GGE/Chemistry will be retained.
• We forced management to offer voluntary redundancy packages to all staff at risk. This was not their original intention and did not occur in previous redundancy programmes at Leicester. To date, there have been no compulsory redundancies arising from the strategic review.

It is not a victory when colleagues are pushed out through voluntary redundancy or when schools close. But without our collective action, the outcome would have been far worse. While we did not save every job, we are confident that some staff remain employed as a direct result of our action.

Why continue to strike?

It would be a mistake to think the battle is over.

Key decisions concerning Chemistry, GGE, and professional services cuts are still to be ratified, and further job losses across professional services are likely to be announced in summer 2026. We will continue to argue in negotiations for an end to the threat to jobs—but arguments alone are not enough. They must be backed by the credible threat of collective action.

The threat of strike action makes negotiation more effective. If logic and reason alone were sufficient, we would already have won many times over. The reality is that senior management holds a fundamentally different view of what the university should be, and we have already been told that further savings are required.

All academic areas are expected to develop plans to raise their contribution ratios (defined narrowly as net income over costs) towards at least 45%, the university average. We have seen the consequence of not achieving these arbitrary targets!

There is a major struggle ahead. What we do now will shape how confident management feels about imposing further attacks.

Is there an alternative to striking?

The trade union movement has long debated alternatives to strike action, and these discussions continue within Leicester UCU. We already use non-strike industrial action, including “action short of a strike” (ASOS). This can involve working to contract, Marking and Assessment Boycotts (MAB), or withdrawing cooperation from specific activities (although members have voted not to undertake a marking and assessment boycott at Leicester at this time).

We also organise protests and lobbies alongside industrial action. These are an important part of our campaigning toolkit.

However, experience shows that non-strike action alone is rarely sufficient to defeat redundancy programmes.

One specific problem with forms of ASOS beyond “working to contract” is that university management, here and elsewhere, increasingly responds with threats of punitive pay deductions. As a result, the financial cost to members can be similar to— or even greater than—strike action because the university believes it can deduct pay on an ongoing basis for breaches of contract other than strikes. Hence, in practice, strikes are often less costly.

More broadly, non-strike actions rarely win major industrial disputes on their own. Given that strikes have been used for over two centuries—and often at significant cost—if a simpler and cheaper alternative existed, strikes would have disappeared long ago. Sadly, they have not.

History bears this out:

• the USS pension dispute that successfully reversed some of the attacks on our pension scheme involved 69 days of strike action (2018–24),
• the successful campaign against redundancies at Liverpool University in 2021 combined strikes, a MAB, and the threat of all-out action,
• in 2025, 44 strike days at Newcastle University prevented compulsory redundancies.
• at Leicester, it was also the threat of extensive action that forced management to back down over plans to initiate a programme of redundancies in 2018.

All of us want to minimise the need for prolonged strikes. But unless we are prepared to accept every attack unchallenged, we must be willing to threaten—and sometimes take—this form of action. The stronger and more unified our action, the shorter and less costly it is likely to be, and the better the outcomes we can win.