Methods of massive university staffing cuts are now quite streamlined across the UK. At my institution, like many other universities over the course of 2026, voluntary severance schemes trailed the announcement of 400 academic staff job losses on the second day of the teaching term, followed (the next morning at 8am) by 1,800 staff receiving risk of redundancy letters.

This triggered the now-standard staff consultation on the plans for cuts and restructures run at the same time as the 90 day statutory consultation period for making mass redundancies. This creates a mirage of possibilities on top of mass panic – the plans are in formation, we value your expertise in shaping the future of the university, and you have 45 days until we issue your individual redundancy notice.

Here, I want to reflect on my experience of being a union negotiator in this statutory hallucinatory process. Alongside brilliant colleagues, I have now negotiated in dozens of formal union meetings over academic and professional services job cuts and restructures, including (in December 2025) our second successful negotiation for a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies in 2026. I have three main observations from this grim ethnography.

1. The unresolved question of what is of (and makes) value

Negotiation meetings lay bare how university staff and management each have fundamentally different ideas of what is valuable and what generates value. Staff are provided a preschool-level budgetary explanation – a specific deficit number and a specific surplus target that must be met through both higher incomes (more students and grants) and cost-cutting (fewer staff and buildings). Staff are a cost; they do not apparently produce value or returns. It is a surreal thing to ask a Chief Financial Officer how they understand the value of labour, and I can also tell you that it is totally pointless.

For management, it appears that income is generated through ‘futures’, commercialising some research, and vibes. At my institution, this was packaged in an AI-generated video that appeared to lift content directly from a series of consultancy blog posts. Management seems to depend entirely on these parasitic consultancies for income-planning and strategy, with an abject lack of interest in the work of their own employed experts. None of the shop-floor income-making ideas designed in the frantic ‘consultation’ in 2025 seem to have been taken up. Instead, staff are valued based on a nebulous ‘alignment’ with a hermetic strategy for ‘futures’, judged on our ‘attractiveness’ (to what, or whom, we do not know).

We do not get the requested evidence for their cuts and models. Everything is a ‘living document’, without notes on edits or version histories. Everything is iterative, inflected, and adaptive. Staff receive error-ridden documentation, including in new contractual paperwork, even if teams raise the errors spotted in drafts in advance.

2. It is all our fault

In formal union meetings, it often feels like management are extremely frustrated that staff just do not get it – both the apparent inevitability of vicious staffing cuts, and the grand ‘futures’ that the cuts are in aid of. Management’s pedagogical approach is to demand that we understand: management surveys keep asking staff whether we understand their plans, as if the deficit is our comprehension of their (fuzzy) paperwork. Management risk assessments include how their staff are frustratingly obstructive and oppositional; we just don’t understand or like necessary change. Management threatening and disciplining staff and union representatives has therefore become apparently routine, including in the press. In negotiations, senior management ask the unions to get on board with their grand strategies, instead of us just banging on about secure and fair work, fair workloads, mental and physical safety in a workplace where we have had recent staff suicides on campus.

This means that management are endlessly disappointed in us as union representatives. I am now very used to being berated by the university executive and heads of HR. We are inefficient, inconsistent (we can’t and won’t send the same negotiating team to all meetings), we can’t drop teaching for last-minute meetings or hours of observer work at staff re-mapping panels. This is revealing of management’s very limited understanding of their own staff’s actual jobs and working conditions.

In contrast, our negotiation papers and letters – with written queries about legalities and process – are, we were told recently, disruptive of their abilities to do their jobs, and taking up too much time. We do not understand that their important work is very difficult and stressful. We are told that we don’t care about students, because we only ask questions about staffing and systems — these things are apparently unconnected to teaching. Ultimately, because the proposed solutions (staff cuts) are inevitable, the unions are the problem: by initiating an industrial dispute over the threat of compulsory redundancies and dangerous workloads, the unions are the culprits in stressing out staff and worrying students. This is what we are told with exasperation in negotiation meetings.

3. They have no plans, and they cannot be stopped

It feels increasingly impossible to negotiate because there appears to be no coherent plan, coupled with little to no interest in working with unions or staff to make one. Any academic who applies for Voluntary Redundancy is accepted and let go, regardless of their role in the university. The unions haven’t had updates on management’s staff cuts targets since June 2025, we suspect because the answer is "as many as possible.”

Of course this is normal: union work in the UK is only a way of trying to slow the rapid decline of working conditions and job security. Negotiations are about stalling cuts projects and trying to bargain down the redundancy targets. Other than some rare and dubious negotiation “wins” (saving the Schools of Music and Nursing after many staff took redundancy, for example), we have only ever stopped immediate cuts when we actually threaten them back – with a marking and assessment boycott in the spring of 2025, with evidence of their proposals’ illegality (such as suggestions of constructive dismissal, and breaches of Health & Safety laws), or with a sustained media storm.

Consultation is now thin on the ground anyway. The 90-day consultation in early 2025 was a legal fig leaf, used to cover whatever staffing cuts management wanted to make until 2030. Unions have not been consulted over new leadership and governance structures, including the widespread removal of Equality, Diversity & Inclusion responsibilities across the university, cuts to libraries, and new Foundation programmes to be taught by remaining overworked staff. Our formal negotiation papers receive responses from management after an average of 73 days. 39 consultation meetings have been cancelled by management this academic year. Requests for action on statutory duties have not been replied to. The Vice-Chancellor has not met with the unions since April 2025. The role of union negotiator appears to be redundant as well.