From 2018 to 2023, the UK university sector faced an industrial dispute between staff, represented most often by the University and College Union (UCU), and their employers, represented by Universities UK (UUK) and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA). The dispute was initially over proposed changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), a pension scheme. The changes would have seen a significant drop in worker compensation, and in response the sector experienced industrial action on a scale not before seen. Pay equality, workload, casualisation, and pay levels (dubbed the "Four Fights") were added to the dispute in 2019. Action was curtailed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, but resumed in 2021.

By March 2023 a resolution had been reached on the USS, which returned to 2017 terms in a victory for the UCU. The UCU was however not successful on The Four Fights, as a November 2023 ballot for extending action failed on turnout. Many universities faced mass redundancies in 2024 amid declining funding. Around a quarter of universities were planning to cut staff in 2025.

The dispute was the longest in UK higher-education history, involving 42,000 staff and affecting over one million students. The lost teaching hours, along with COVID related disruption, was the subject of a 2024 class action lawsuit which was resolved outside of court. It has been characterised as a "milestone" for "impending service sector strikes of the 21st century." It pre-dated but ran concurrently with a wave of industrial action nationwide in response to the cost of living crisis.

Background to the strikes

As of 2018, the United Kingdom had 130 universities. Staff at 68 universities founded before 1992 were members of the USS pension scheme and were involved in disputes about that scheme. (Most academic staff at institutions which became universities after 1992 were members of the Teachers' Pension Scheme, which was unaffected by the USS dispute.) Staff at all universities were involved in disputes about pay and conditions of employment.

The strikes took place in the context of wider tensions over higher education and pension provision in the UK.Sebastian Borger, 'Professoren wollen Universitäten lahmlegen', Frankfurther Rundschau, 74.44 (21 February 2018), p. 23.Daniel Zylbersztajn, 'Stillstand an den Unis ', Taz (22 February 2018).Steven Parfitt, 'Lecturers on Strike ', Jacobin (21 February 2018).

Pensions The USS pension scheme

The Universities Superannuation Scheme was created in 1974 to provide sector-wide pensions for UK university staff (focusing on academic staff).Douglas Logan, The Birth of a Pension Scheme. A History of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (Liverpool University Press 1985). Its terms changed little until 2011, when major reforms were implemented, followed by further changes in 2014–15.Emmanouil Platanakis and Charles Sutcliffe, 'Pension Schemes, Taxation and Stakeholder Wealth: The USS Rule Changes', ICMA Centre, Discussion Paper Number: ICM-2017-08 (23 January 2018): https://ssrn.com/abstract=3039364; . These left scheme members markedly worse off: one academic study concluded that the reduced wealth of post-2011 entrants was equivalent to an 11% drop in their total compensation or a 13% drop in their salaries.Emmanouil Platanakis and Charles Sutcliffe, 'Pension Scheme Redesign and Wealth Redistribution Between the Members and Sponsor: The USS Rule Change in October 2011', Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, 69 (2016), 14–28.

By 2017, the USS scheme had over 400,000 members.

Wider UK pensions

The UK Pensions Act 2004 had placed stringent requirements on private-sector pensions to ensure that their liabilities could be met even if all their member organisations collapsed at once—which in the context of USS would entail the whole University system going bust, an event deemed unlikely by many. Over 2006–17, the proportion of UK private-sector defined-benefit schemes open to new joiners declined from 43% to 14%.'Backing for defined benefit pension scheme bucks trend', The Financial Times (5 October 2018). In the analysis of Mervyn King and John Kay, 'The 2004 Pensions Act is a prime, but by no means unique, example of well-intentioned but inept financial regulation. Over-prescriptive, it has led to the demise of the defined benefit schemes that it was designed to protect. If proposed changes to the USS are implemented, there will be no defined benefit schemes of any significant size outside the public sector open to new members.Mervyn King and John Kay, 'USS crisis: can the pension system be reformed?', Times Higher Education (6 September 2018), https://www.johnkay.com/2018/09/06/uss-crisis-can-the-pension-system-be-reformed/. Similar or even more dramatic proposed pension cuts for universities' non-academic staff. For example, in January 2018, Southampton University began consultations on closing its defined-benefits pension scheme for non-academic staff, and in March 2018, Staffordshire University began consultations on moving support staff from the defined-benefit local government scheme to a local defined-contribution scheme. Worsening outlooks for pension provision across the UK, in the context of rising remuneration for fund managers and increasing integration of pension funds into speculative financial markets.E.g. Christine Berry, 'USS is the tip of the iceberg. Our pensions system is a hot mess ', OpenDemocracy (1 March 2018). For example, it was noted that pay for USS's chief executive rose from £484,000 in 2017 to £566,000 in 2018, while two staff members earned over £1m, and running costs stood at £125m per annum.Sean Coughlan, 'University pension boss's £82,000 pay rise', BBC News (22 February 2018).

Pay and conditions

Concern among university staff about falling real-terms pay for most staff.Phoebe Braithwaite, 'The university pensions strike is a last resort for STEM academics ', Wired (23 February 2018). Moreover, the pay projections assumed in USS's 2017 valuation and used to argue for reducing pensions assumed an increase in general pay growth: rather than assuming pay would keep up with inflation (as measured by the consumer price index), USS assumed pay growth one percent above inflation (as measured, more generously, by the Retail Price Index).D. Spiegelhalter and others, 'Examining the Numbers on Pension Valuation', The Financial Times (19 September 2017); available at https://www.dannydorling.org/?p=6109 and http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_id6103.pdf. On 16 April 2018, staff were actually offered a payrise of 1.7%, below both CPI inflation (then 2.7%) and RPI (then 3.6%).Jack Grove, 'UK university staff offered 1.7 per cent pay rise for 2018-19', Times Higher Education (16 April 2016). Concerns about inflation, among both employers and employees, grew acute in 2022, as inflation in the United Kingdom spiked for the first time in over a decade, rapidly eroding the real value of pay, pensions, and student fee income. Growing numbers of academic staff were on precarious short-term or zero-hours contracts – in 2018–19, 34% of academic staff were employed on short-term contracts and 13% were paid by the hour."Students hit by 14-day university lecturers strike", BBC News (20 February 2020)."Higher Education Staff Statistics: UK, 2018/19", Statistical Bulletin SB256 (23 January 2020). In March 2018, UCU argued on the basis of data from a freedom of information request that an average of 27% UK university teaching hours were delivered by such staff.Sophie Inge, 'UK universities rely on casual staff 'for up to half of teaching' ', Times Higher Education (6 March 2016). The issue of casualisation became increasingly prominent in UCU members' understanding of the strikes as they developed.Sophie Inge, ''Genie out of the bottle' on casualisation after pension strikes ', Times Higher Education (21 March 2018). Similar concerns were being voiced across Europe, for example through the 2016 Bratislava DeclarationElisabeth Pain, "Young European researchers set groundwork for policy changes", Science (30 August 2016)."Bratislava Declaration of Young Researchers". and the 2021 German #IchBinHanna movement.David Matthews, "#IchbinHanna: German researchers snap over lack of permanent jobs", Times Higher Education (21 June 2021).Cf. Cecile B. Menard and Sara Shinton, 'The Career Paths of Researchers in Long-term Employment on Short-term Contracts: Case Study from a UK University', PLOS One (9 September 2022), . Public concern about rising pay for University senior management, particularly Vice-chancellors.Troy A. Heffernan, 'Reporting on vice-chancellor salaries in Australia's and the United Kingdom's media in the wake of strikes, cuts and "falling performance"', International Journal of Leadership in Education Theory and Practice, 24.5 (2021), 571-87, .Sally Weale, "Universities brace for government scrutiny after Policy Exchange report", The Guardian (1 March 2020).Jamie Doward, 'Revealed: British university vice-chancellors' five-star expenses ', The Guardian (24 February 2018). Similar concerns were reflected by strike action around the same time more widely in UK professional classes: junior doctors undertook their first strikes in the history of the National Health Service (England) in 2015–16, while barristers began strike action on 1 April 2018.'British professionals revolt as austerity hits the middle class ', The Economist (26 April 2018).

National UK higher education policy Debates about tuition fee levels and the mechanisms for paying them. In particular, on 19 February 2018, the UK Prime Minister Theresa May had announced an official review of UK higher education funding.Sean Coughlan, 'Theresa May's university review will not scrap fees ', BBC News (19 February 2018). The increasingly corporate and privatised character of higher education institutions. For example, universities, whose capital expenditure had traditionally been funded to a significant extent by government funding, were increasingly borrowing from private capital markets, making them concerned about their credit ratings, and with uncertain consequences for their finances and governance.Thomas Hale, 'Universities and the allure of capital markets ', Financial Times (6 March 2018).Rosemary Bennett, Nicola Woolcock and Ryan Watts, 'University debt: credit crunch looms as debt spirals', ''The Times'' (3 January 2019), . The creation of the Office for Students on 1 January 2018, whose powers came into force 1 April 2018. For example, on 28 February 2018, the OFS said that "universities that fail to mitigate the impact of the strikes would open themselves up to regulatory intervention".Harry Yorke, 'Universities told they face fines if strikes harm students', The Daily Telegraph (27 February 2018), 2.

2018 USS pension negotiations, and associated strike action

Prior to industrial action

In July 2017, USS reported a technical deficit (i.e. a gap between the fund's assets and its liabilities) of £17.5 billion, reported as the largest such shortfall in the UK at that time. USS's deficit evaluation was based on suggestions that although the fund's assets had grown (reaching £60 billion, a one-fifth increase on the previous year), its liabilities had also grown (reaching £78 billion, a one-third increase over the previous year). Following negotiations regarding the calculation of the deficit, the USS Joint Negotiating Committee accepted a technical deficit of £6.1 billion in November 2017.

The key change proposed by UUK was to close USS's defined benefit scheme (possibly temporarily), replacing it with a defined contribution scheme.Ben Chu, 'If you look at the economics, it's completely reasonable for university lecturers to strike over pension changes', The Independent (25 February 2018).