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Home Canterbury News Article
The University of Kent will be hit with 14 days of strike action this month and next in a dispute over pay and conditions.
The walk-out by up to 850 lecturers and other staff has been called by the University and College Union (UCU) and will affect both the campuses in Canterbury and Medway.
The action will start on Thursday, February 20 and escalate each week, culminating with a week-long walkout from Monday, March 9 to Friday, March 13.
The disputes centres on the universities’ alleged failure to make improvements in pay, equality and workloads.
There are more than 850 UCU members at both Kent campuses and the union says it expects most of them to join in the action.
A year ago, the University of Kent announced it was making redundancies in the wake of "significant challenges" which were likely to lead to a financial deficit.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Karen Cox, told staff that a voluntary severance scheme was being launched with a view to making savings on staffing costs.
But this week, the UCU warned it would ballot members after this wave of strikes, if the disputes could not be resolved, to ensure branches could take action until the end of the academic year.
As well as the strike days, union members are undertaking 'action short of a strike' which involves things like working strictly to contract, not covering for absent colleagues and refusing to reschedule lectures lost to strike action.
UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: ‘If universities want to avoid further disruption they need to send their representatives back to the national negotiating table with solutions to deal the problems over pay and conditions.
"We have been clear from the outset that we would take serious and sustained industrial action if that was what was needed.
"As well as the strikes later this month, we are going to ballot members to ensure that we have a fresh mandate for action to continue until the end of the academic year if these disputes are not resolved."
