THOUSANDS of workers across Scottish colleges took to picket lines and rallied at Holyrood today as they fight two years’ worth of pay cuts.

Members of Unison, including librarians, IT specialists, administrators, cleaners and canteen staff, have joined forces with teaching comrades in EIS-Fela to demand a wage boost that was due to have been delivered in September 2022.

College Employers Scotland (CES) has offered a 16 per cent uplift from September 2024, but — without backdating to cover the two-year negotiation period which has seen rocketing food and energy prices and the highest inflation in a generation — workers have rejected it as real-terms pay cut. 

EIS general secretary Andrea Bradley said: “It should be a matter of deep shame to both college employers and the Scottish government that the country’s hard-working and dedicated college lecturers are still waiting for a fair pay offer, a year-and-half after they should have had their pay increase settled.

“It should be a further source of shame that, rather than seeking to resolve the dispute, some college principals have instead poured fuel on the flames by threatening to withhold pay from lecturers engaged in a work to rule and resulting boycott as part of a legitimate programme of industrial action.

“This reprehensible threat, which runs counter to the Scottish government’s stated opposition to Westminster anti-trade union laws, violates every policy of sound industrial relations and fair work principles and seems designed to make the dispute worse, to the detriment of lecturers, students and college communities.”

Ms Bradley said that by taking national strike action and by turning out at Holyrood, “Scotland’s further education lecturers are making clear that they will not be cowed into submission by the bullying tactics of Scotland’s college principals.”

CES’s Gavin Donoghue said that colleges “simply cannot offer to give what they do not have, especially when government funding is set to fall by nearly 5 per cent in 2024-25.”

To hammer home the impact of those cuts in the latest SNP-Green Scottish Budget, amounting to £26 million, further strikes are planned to target the constituencies of First Minster Humza Yousaf and his deputy and finance minister, Shona Robison, as well as the constituencies of the education secretary and the further education minister.

A Scottish government spokesperson said: “It is, of course, for the college unions and employers to negotiate pay, terms and conditions, not the Scottish government.”