Dundee and Edinburgh UCU branches strike for five weeks of co-ordinated strike action
By Carlo Morelli, UCU Dundee rep
Dundee UCU in their second of five weeks of strike action have now been joined by Edinburgh UCU, in their own five weeks of strikes. Both union branches are striking against threatened compulsory redundancies, as Scottish Higher Education is engulfed in a governance and funding crisis.
Dundee’s strikes follow the ‘incompetent’ mismanagement of the previous management who were forced out by UCU strikes in 2025. But now the new management group are pursuing over 1,000 job cuts, slashing support for students and destroying academic units. The union’s campaign forced management to back off the closure of the Mathematics and Philosophy degree programmes but now has moved to stop the compulsory redundancies.
In the case of Edinburgh, the University is not even in deficityet it is pursuing the removal of over 90 programmes and 1,800 job cuts in a bid to generate £140m worth of “savings”. The University has already targeted staff on casual and insecure contracts as hidden redundancies were the first to be cut.
However, the two union branches have chosen to co-ordinate their industrial action and identified the first half of the first semester to maximise the impact of their individual disputes.
No Scottish exceptionalism
Scotland, with its free tuition for home students, is often seen as an alternative model for the future funding of the sector. However, managements in Scotland have pursued the same capital expenditure expansion plans and internationalisation strategies that have plagued the wider UK-sector. This same marketisation and privatisation is therefore at the centre of the current crisis in Scotland. UCU members would be unable to tell the difference in their working conditions and employment contracts between Scottish and UK institutions. Nor would students be able to distinguish between the Scottish system and the rest of the UK in respect to their large classes, expensive accommodation and cuts to student support.
The governance crisis across the whole of the UK sector is central to understand what is now occurring in Scotland. In 2025 an enquiry into the collapse of management at Dundee University, the Gillies Report, highlighted;
… [T]he top-down, hierarchical and reportedly over-confident style of leadership and management, a lack of transparency and clarity in respect of financial data, the promulgation of a positive narrative around financial matters and a culture in which challenge was actively discouraged.
Source: Gillies Report 2025, p.2. Available at Gillies-Report.pdf
What is clear is that without major governance reform, removing the unaccountable, over-paid and market-driven leaderships of these institutions, the crisis in funding will be intensified across the whole sector and no additional funding won by the union will be used to improve the conditions of staff or students.
Strike action and Solidarity
Both UCU branches have received strong support from students for pursing their action. Dundee strikers have been overwhelmed by the solidarity shown by the Students Against the Cuts campaign joining the picket lines every day. In Edinburgh over 900 students and staff crammed into lecture theatres last week to organise the campaign to reclaim the University. The slogan “Our working conditions are students learning conditions” has never been more apt in these two disputes.
Solidarity shown by other UCU branches to Dundee’s first week of strike action has been tremendous with thousands of pounds raised already and a legal crowdfund to bring a judicial review against the university reaching its initial target in just two days. The same support is now needed by Edinburgh UCU where their branch has been pursing a marking and assessment boycott prior to the current strikes. UCU members across the UK clearly understand the importance of this dispute.
However, the UK-leadership of UCU has been singularly ineffective in their support for the strikes. The union is failing to generalise these two disputes into a campaign over governance failures and the wider funding crisis. In Scotland, with higher education a devolved power, we effectively have a dispute with the ‘Secretary of State’ in the form of the First Minister. Yet despite union policy in favour of such a dispute there is no campaign addressing the governance crisis let alone the funding crisis. The two branches have called a rally at the Scottish Parliament this week to highlight the importance of the Scottish Government’s involvement in these disputes. Similarly, rather than provide maximum financial support to these strikes access to the UCU Fighting Fund has been restricted and donations from branches is therefore crucial to their success. Symbolically, Dundee is only now, in the second week of the strike, due to have a visit to their picket line by Jo Grady, UCU General Secretary!
Leadership
The dynamic leadership and campaigning in these two disputes has come from left leaning branch committees which have focused upon maximising involvement of the members, engagement with students and combining industrial action with political campaigning. In Edinburgh’s case, particularly, the conservative right-wing leadership had to be overturned in order to galvanise the strike action.
UCU’s current strategy for Higher Education UCU – UCU: a new strategy to tackle the higher education crisis and ‘No Short-Cuts’ podcast No Shortcuts – A UCU Podcast – Hosted by UCU by contrast takes the union in the opposite direction. Passivity, lack of attempts at mobilising the membership, a reliance upon everything BUT industrial action will not shift the drift towards greater privatisation and marketisation.
In a political environment whereby student access to higher education is being undermined by a requirement of students to accept a lifetime of financial debt, and the life-changing liberating opportunities provided by higher education is threatened by far-right hostility to intellectual ideas, there is an urgent need to UCU to change its approach.
There are no shortcuts to change without industrial action. The outcome of these two disputes will not be known for weeks, if not months to come, but their success can help transform the sector.
• Invite Dundee and Edinburgh UCU strikers to your trade union or campaign group meeting.
• Send messages of support to ducu@dundee.ac.uk and ucu@ed.ac.uk and donate to the strike funds.
Finally, there are other important disputes across the UK; at Goldsmiths, Nottingham and London South Bank University to name a few for which the above also applies – please send solidarity.