Updates and template email
Dear student,
The University and College Union (UCU) has a mandate to legally undertake industrial action. In an ideal world, that mandate should be enough to encourage employers to negotiate in good faith, and industrial action does not need to take place.
However, in 2025, the University of Strathclyde announced plans to save £35 million over two years—despite previously claiming to be in a strong financial position—with many of the proposed savings expected to come from job cuts. These reductions can harm the quality of education and student support by increasing workloads for remaining staff and weakening the learning environment.
Yet, despite continuous engagement from campus unions, the university leadership, led by Principal Stephen MacArthur, has not provided clear evidence explaining why the cuts are necessary or explored alternatives, and has not ruled out compulsory redundancies. Meanwhile, redundancy consultations and targeted voluntary severance offers have already begun, causing enormous stress among faculty and staff.
Having hit rock bottom in negotiations with SMT, the campus unions UCU and Unite have balloted for strike action. Ballot has shown overwhelming support among staff, and strike dates were called by UNITE (16-20/03/2026) and UCU (17-18/03/2026). While we do not want to disrupt student learning we are left no choice but to withdraw our labour in home SMT comes back to the negotiating table. Pushing ahead without transparency risks repeating governance problems seen at the University of Dundee. The redundancy process needs to be paused until the financial case is fully explained and properly reviewed.
If you support faculty and staff in the struggle for more meaningful negotiations and ruling out compulsory redundancies, below is a template which you can adapt to your own needs and interests. It may, for instance, be that you want to add something you feel very strongly about or to personalise the text with your own experiences. It is only a template; feel free to adapt it to your liking!
Practical advice:
- Email from your …strath.ac.uk address
- Choose your own subject line to avoid emails going to spam!
- Send your email to s.mcarthur@strath.ac.uk & principal@strath.ac.uk
Suggested letter text:
Dear Senior Management Team (SMT) at the University of Strathclyde,
I am a [insert level and year of study] student at [school/faculty], and I wanted to take a moment to write to you about upcoming industrial action undertaken by UNITE and UCU, and to express my support for faculty and staff at our university.
As you might understand, students are in a very difficult position with regards to strikes: our families and we are making an enormous personal sacrifice to pay for education which is now withheld from us. I am deeply concerned about the upcoming strikes’ impact on my education, and am of course keen to avoid any disruption to my learning.
However, I believe that making staff who teach us redundant will affect students negatively. Staff have already been in dispute with the university and the sector over large workloads – they deserve to be treated with fairness and dignity, and given more time and space to focus on the education they provide to us. Instead, the university is cutting the number of staff and compromising our experience of classroom instruction, supervision and pastoral care.
I therefore believe that the best way to avoid disruption from industrial action is for the Strathclyde Senior Management Team to engage in meaningful negotiation and reach an agreement with the campus unions so that the strikes can be called off. To this effect, as a student and member of this community, I respect the demands of the faculty members and insist that the SMT takes them seriously.
I therefore write to you today to ask the Principal to use his important position to negotiate: (1) A detailed financial case for restructuring needs to be shared with campus trade unions along with any non-salary cost savings which have been explored; (2) Compulsory staff redundancies have to be ruled out; (3) All related grievances have to be resolved using the agreed grievance process.
Yours sincerely,
[name]