Bangor University staff at are set to walkout on strike again over pay, working conditions and pensions.

Staff at 74 UK universities are set to launch the latest wave of strike action in February which will last for four weeks. The action, by members of the University and College Union (UCU), will affect about 1,200,000 students at universities across the UK.

The walkout follows eight days of strikes in November and December last year and strikes in 2018, which brought university campuses across the UK to a standstill.

Striking staff are angry at the rising costs to members of the pension scheme, the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), and about what they say is universities’ “failure to make significant improvements on pay, equality, casualisation and workloads.”

As well as the strike days, union members are undertaking “action short of a strike”. This involves things like working strictly to contract, not covering for absent colleagues and refusing to reschedule lectures lost to strike action.

On workload the UCU are demanding:

  • a reduction in the maximum weekly teaching hours from 24 to 21
  • a consequential reduction in the maximum annual teaching hours
  • an increase in the amount of preparation and marking time from 20 minutes to 30 minutes for every hour of teaching.

The union also warned it would ballot members after this wave of strikes if the disputes could not be resolved, to ensure branches could take action until the end of the academic year. Strike mandates are only legally valid for six months, so branches who walked out in November would need to secure a fresh mandate to be able to continue to take action after April.

UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: “We have seen more members back strikes since the winter walkouts and this next wave of action will affect even more universities and students. If universities want to avoid further disruption they need to deal with rising pension costs, and address the problems over pay and conditions.

“We have been clear from the outset that we would take serious and sustained industrial action if that was what was needed. As well as the strikes next month, we are going to ballot members to ensure that we have a fresh mandate for further action to cover the rest of the academic year if these disputes are not resolved.”

The strike action will take place between 20 February and 13 March

The full university UCU strike dates are:
Week One – Thursday 20 and Friday 21 February
Week Two – Monday 24 and Tuesday 25 and Thursday 26 February
Week Three – Monday 2, Tuesday 3, Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 March
Week Four – Monday 9, Tuesday 10, Wednesday 11, Thursday 12 and Friday 13 of March