THE ISSUE: Is it right for university staff to be striking over their offered pay rise?

In those five months, staff from across Oxford University, Oxford Brookes and City of Oxford College have organised picket lines six times and marched through Oxford city centre.

Strikes have involved three full day actions, with union members of the University and College Union (UCU), Unison and Unite, and three two-hour strikes from UCU members.

YES says Terry Hoad – Oxford UCU member

Lengthy negotiations involving the trade unions representing all staff from maintenance, clerical and security staff to lecturers, librarians and researchers have seen the Universities and Colleges Employers Association [UCEA] steadfastly refusing to offer more than a one per cent pay increase for the current year. In a succession of years, the employers have refused a pay rise of more than 0.5-1 per cent.

By contrast, the annual rate of inflation has ranged between 2.5 per cent and 4.5 per cent. Over four years the value of university salaries has fallen by 13 per cent.

Some staff receive no more than the Living Wage (currently £7.65 per hour). In some universities, shamefully, even less. Many staff are less well paid than they would be in other jobs, after spending years without earning while acquiring their qualifications.

Our society needs its universities to ensure continued prosperity and the best medical care and other essential services. And it’s known that well educated populations lead to healthier, happier and more cohesive societies.

We have good universities in the UK, but they will cease to be good if their staff are not given fair remuneration and become demoralised, or if worsening pay levels, workloads and insecurity of employment deter able new entrants to the profession.

We believe in the work we do. We are proud of our contribution to the lives of individual students and to the wellbeing of society. We appreciate students’ understanding of the need for us to take action, and that their interests and ours are inseparable.

University employers have the money available to offer adequate pay. Large rises are thought appropriate and possible for vice chancellors, many of whom already earn 20 or more times as much as the lowest paid staff in their institutions.

Yet the employers insist the majority of their staff must once again face a decline in their standard of living. What is left for those staff to do but strike, to protect themselves and their families, but also to try to prevent the otherwise inevitable decline of our universities?

NO says Maryam Ahmed MEng (Oxon) DPhil Student, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

The University and College Union’s decision to disrupt thousands of students’ learning through strike action this month is both baffling and riddled with contradictions.

For starters, the UCU has vastly exaggerated the level of national support for industrial action. Last year, general secretary Sally Hunt referred to ‘widespread anger’ over fair pay and claimed the strikes would be ‘very well supported’. Not quite. According to the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, barely five per cent of workers in the sector voted in favour of industrial action, with only eight per cent turning up to vote at all. This is hardly a mandate from the masses; indeed, it appears the vast majority of teaching staff understand that targeting undergraduates in a bid to secure a pay rise is neither ethical nor pragmatic.

In another show of hypocrisy, the UCU is perfectly happy to accept displays of solidarity from the very students they’re short changing, whilst historically refusing to offer the same solidarity in return. For example, the UCU holds policies against some forms of teaching surveys – one of the few channels via which students can hold their lecturers to account, voice their dissatisfaction, and effect real change within their university.

Any undergraduates who maintain that the UCU is a student-friendly organisation should look to a recent campaign update on the planned strikes; ‘this [action] is aimed at causing the maximum disruption while costing members less in terms of lost pay’. The UCU has made its priorities clear – maximising disruption to students whilst minimising inconvenience to its own members. There is not a single mention of mitigating the damage or cost to students, many of whom are paying the daunting sum of £9,000 a year for contact time with the same academics who have abandoned them.

The UCU is simply not playing fair. Its decision to take industrial action is hugely unpopular amongst its own members, and shows a complete lack of regard for the challenges facing financially squeezed undergraduates across the country.

This latest wave of strikes is unjustifiable and we, the residents of Oxford who love our city and our university, should denounce it wholeheartedly.