STAFF at the University of Stirling are beginning 15 days of strike action on Monday over salaries, conditions and pay docking.

Members of the University and College Union (UCU) voted to withdraw their labour after bosses deducted 50 per cent from the pay of workers taking part in the union’s national marking and assessment boycott. 

The UCU argued that the pay docking has caused real hardship to low-paid workers during the cost-of-living crisis, branding the practice “punitive and disproportionate.”

It insisted that the deductions do not reasonably reflect the proportion of time normally spent by the union’s members on marking and assessments and that, after other institutions have agreed to end the practice or have smaller deductions, the University of Stirling remains an outlier in deducting 50 per cent.

Stirling workers will strike on every weekday for a fortnight, before joining 70,000 of their UCU comrades in a national five-day stoppage beginning on September 25, as they battle for better pay and conditions and against growing workloads and what they describe as “gig-economy” casualisation across the higher education sector.

UCU is also about to begin balloting members for a fresh mandate for industrial action. 

This will allow the union to escalate the dispute later this year and into 2024.

UCU Scotland’s Mary Senior said: “Stirling university management has brought an unprecedented 15 days of strike action at the start of the new academic year on the university and our students by taking a hard-line stance on relations with their own workers. 

“Other employers have limited deductions, but Stirling university’s belligerent approach is deeply disappointing. 

“Staff want to be welcoming new students. The last thing we want to be doing is taking strike action now.”

The university was contacted for comment.