Union bosses have defended demands for a £2,500 university staff pay rise after they were branded “unrealistic".
It comes as national strikes continue over pensions, with industrial action also planned to secure improved salaries and working conditions.
Employees at Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, St Andrews, Stirling, Strathclyde and the Open universities are among those participating.
Around 6,000 staff are set to take to the picket line, with 68 institutions around the UK facing disruption.
READ MORE: How will a Scottish university strike affect me?
Leaders at the University and College Union (UCU) said turnout so far had been excellent and insisted members were determined to achieve change.
However, the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) has strongly criticised the union’s remuneration calls, which would mean an uplift of £2,500 on all pay points.
UCEA chief executive Raj Jethwa said: “In the pay dispute, any industrial action next week is an unrealistic attempt to force all 146 employers to re-open the concluded 2021-22 national pay round.
“We respect employees’ right to take lawful industrial action, but it is misleading to their members for UCU to ask them to lose pay – in addition to the 3 days’ pay lost in December - in pursuit of an unrealistic 7% pay demand at just over one third of the HEIs in the collective pay arrangements.”
READ MORE: University strikes - Bosses 'underestimating' staff anger
The criticisms have been firmly rejected by union bosses.
Mary Senior, the UCU’s Scotland official, said: “It’s disappointing but not surprising to hear employers dismissing UCU’s pay claim.
“What is unrealistic is university leaders’ expectations that staff will sit quietly in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, when they’ve already had below inflation pay rises for the past 12 years. University workers have seen a 20% pay cut in real terms over that period. But not everyone’s pay has been held down, we have some university principals with salaries of up to £340,000.
"Its time those principals delivered a fair deal for all workers in our universities.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here