Staff at Imperial College London will walk out tomorrow as part of escalating industrial action over what they describe as years of real-terms pay cuts. The University and College Union (UCU)

confirmed the four-day strike, running from Tuesday 25 to Friday 28 November, with picket lines set for the South Kensington and White City campuses each morning from 8:30am to 10:30am.

The dispute centres on management’s refusal to improve a below-inflation 2% pay offer — a proposal overwhelmingly rejected by members of UCU, Unison and Unite. UCU says the college has the financial headroom to do better, pointing to Imperial’s ongoing £2bn capital investment programme.

Tensions have risen further after the university admitted that figures used to justify its original pay position were miscalculated. Despite acknowledging the error, Imperial insisted staff pay remained above its benchmarking data. The union, however, says management knowingly allowed the conclusions of an internal review to be misrepresented. While the review recommended a significant uplift to salary benchmarks, staff were told it had instead concluded the existing benchmarks were “appropriate.”

Negotiations have also been strained by disagreements over parental leave. According to UCU, management initially offered to extend enhanced paternity pay, which would have resulted in fathers receiving more fully-paid leave than mothers. When unions argued maternity pay should be increased to maintain fairness, Imperial withdrew the additional paternity benefit and instead reduced shared parental leave to “level down.”

With no progress in talks, UCU has announced a further 10 days of strike action from 1–12 December if management fails to return to the negotiating table.

Staff have already taken six days of strike action this term, and the union says that unless the college offers a meaningful improvement on pay, disruption will continue into December.

UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: 'Imperial staff will once again down tools this week because they refuse to accept a real-terms pay cut while university management freely spends billions of pounds elsewhere.  

'The mistakes Imperial management is making, to avoid giving staff what they deserve, will have serious consequences. The Provost must stop misrepresenting a salary review, which clearly concluded that pay needs to rise, as a reason to suppress wages and return to the negotiating table with a meaningful offer.' 

President of Imperial UCU, Vijay Tymms said: “Members are furious that after first failing to check their calculations, we now find senior management has behaved in such an underhand way. When this review was first announced, we were told that our input would "help shape the principles to inform our decisions". Nobody thought those decisions would include rewriting the recommendations of the review”. Photo by Shadowssettle, Wikimedia commons.