Created on: 12 Aug 2025
The EIS ULA Executive Committee recommend voting NO to accepting the pay offer and voting YES to taking strike action.
It is no secret that university staff have seen their pay eroded significantly over the last ten years. However, the figures relating to just how much money staff across the sector have lost needs to be seen to be believed. The table below contains each of the last 10 years pay awards, some of which were imposed by employers, and is compared against the RPI percentage for August each year, which is when staff are due to receive their annual pay uplift.
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Comparison of Cumulative Salary (RPI versus actual pay award using spinal point 43) |
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|
Year |
RPI* |
Pay uplift (%) |
Salary with RPI |
Salary with Pay Award |
Cumulative Difference |
|
2016 |
2.2% |
1.1% |
£47,435 |
£46,925 |
£510 |
|
2017 |
3.4% |
1.7% |
£49,048 |
£47,722 |
£1,326 |
|
2018 |
2.9% |
2% |
£50,470 |
£48,677 |
£1,793 |
|
2019 |
2.3% |
1.8% |
£51,631 |
£49,553 |
£2,078 |
|
2020 |
0.9% |
0% |
£52,096 |
£49,533 |
£2,563 |
|
2021 |
4.1% |
1.5% |
£54,232 |
£50,296 |
£3,936 |
|
2022 |
14.8% |
3% |
£62,258 |
£51,805 |
£10,453 |
|
2023 |
8.2% |
5% |
£67,363 |
£54,395 |
£12,968 |
|
2024 |
2.6% |
2.5% |
£69,115 |
£55,755 |
£13,360 |
|
June 2025 |
5.2% |
1.4% |
£72,709 |
£56,536 (as of 1st August 2025) |
£16,173 |
*RPI figures taken from Office of National Statistics; Percentage change over 12 months - Housing and household expenditure (Dataset MM23 – August each year), downloaded on 22/07/2025.
The disparity between what staff should have received in line with inflation and what staff actually received, as either an agreed uplift or an imposed increase, is starkly different. As seen in the table above, someone on pay spine 43 who receives pay rises in line with RPI would be £16,173 better off, equating to a 25% difference, when compared to what they will receive if they accept the 1.4% being offered by university employers. Put simply, members do not have the same spending power they had 10 years ago, which has had a detrimental effect on their standard of living and, in some cases, making it difficult to make ends meet.
Universities also recorded vast surpluses for many of the years that staff had their salaries suppressed. Now that some universities are claiming financial difficulty, the same staff are expected to have their pay further supressed to mitigate the mistakes of senior managers and university courts who have not been held accountable for their financial mismanagement.
Now is the time to stand together and push back against a systematic depreciation of staff pay. We should not have to lower our standard of living because employers do not believe they need to offer us a fair pay rise. We should not have to have an increase in our salary imposed on us once again.
Please cast your vote in the consultative ballot as soon as possible. The EIS ULA Executive Committee is recommending that members reject the pay offer and vote in favour of taking industrial action to pursue an improvement.
We can strengthen our bargaining position and seek an improved offer through our members collective decision to take action.