KCL UCU is formally balloting its members over a trade dispute that is, at its heart, about glaring contradictions in King’s College London’s official stance of ‘values-based impartiality’, a democratic deficit in university governance, and a lack of commitment to protect and improve staff working conditions. Our branch believes that these issues impacting staff working conditions are interlinked with the position of the university in a wider context of increased global militarism, the international normalisation of genocide, the ongoing rise of the far right, and the crisis of funding in UK higher education. Please read about the interrelated components of this dispute below, and cast your vote.
What are the demands of this dispute and how have they evolved?
KCL UCU has been in formal dispute with King’s management since March 2025 over its failure to adequately protect the wellbeing and academic freedom of staff who have been targeted by hostile students because of their solidarity with Palestine. Harassers who have targeted our members through hate demonstrations, media doxxing and the creation and sharing of unauthorised classroom recordings have faced no clear sanction from the university. At the same time, staff who have been targeted (including a Palestinian colleague from Gaza) have faced protracted, harmful and mishandled investigations and disciplinary procedures relating to private social media activity. They have now been fully exonerated, but the process has raised serious questions about the KCL’s willingness to subject staff to this form of harm and its failure to recognise the politically motivated abuse of complaint procedures.
For over a year, the branch has been calling on management to take robust steps in order to prevent any further harassment. We are demanding that management issue a clear public statement reaffirming KCL’s commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism, and the protection of its community from intimidation, harassment and discrimination. We have also been demanding the establishment of an independent investigation into the mishandling of the complaints procedure in these cases.
Through 2025, it has become increasingly clear that management’s failures to protect staff are a result of KCL’s wider silence and complicity in the genocide in Gaza. KCL invests in and takes sponsorship from companies implicated in war crimes, and has likely been teaching military personnel from armed forces implicated in the same. As such, the branch has demanded that a clause be added to contracts at KCL that would allow employees to conscientiously object to participation in any activity connected with the military, the arms trade, fossil fuels and genocide.
KCL claims ‘values based impartiality’, but it refuses to take any steps to divest from companies which are demonstrably enabling the genocide in Gaza and the oppression of the Palestinian people (e.g. companies listed as supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank that the UK government considers to be in violation of international law). Such investments and other institutional links compromise an ever greater number of members’ beliefs, academic freedom, and concerns about complicity in war crimes, constituting a widespread curtailment of terms and conditions of employment.
Failures to protect staff and institutional complicity in war crimes are also a result of the democratic deficit in KCL’s governance structures and an increasing unwillingness to engage with the union on major policy changes. We are therefore returning to the demand of our unresolved 2023 local dispute that KCL Council must have at least 50% of its members as elected staff.
We are also demanding a pause in the implementation of ‘King’s Strategy 2030’ in order for full consultation to take place. As part of that consultation, UCU would be demanding a commitment to no compulsory redundancies as a result of this strategy, and a commitment in the strategy for improvements in staff terms and conditions. This would include reducing casualisation, providing specific support for migrant members, and implementing workload improvements (all of which were recommendations from the joint working groups from our 2023 local dispute, but have yet to be implemented meaningfully).
These different issues are linked by the problems of an intransigent management that is increasingly hostile to consultation and negotiation, and a lack of democratic governance at KCL. We can and should revisit our previous local disputes in light of two major developments: the genocide in Palestine and the national crisis in higher education. The latter has created a context in which universities have become dependent on relationships that tie them to militarism and disincentivise their divestment from companies implicated in war(crimes).
Where is the branch with negotiations on these demands?
As of early October 2025, management’s response to the branch’s demands are as follows:
– Management has offered no new policy on safeguarding staff or a commitment to a public statement on academic freedom, anti-racism, and the protection of its community from intimidation, harassment and discrimination.
– As a result of the failure to progress complaints correctly, UCU has demanded a fully independent review of the process and the broader issues of harassment, intimidation, and academic freedom. Management have so far refused to commission such a review.
– Management has opposed adding a clause to contracts at KCL that would allow employees to conscientiously object to participation in any activity connected with the military, the arms trade, fossil fuels or genocide. There was recognition that, in some cases, reasonable adjustments for protected beliefs are necessary.
– Management have refused to reopen negotiations on our demands for KCL divestment from companies profiting from genocide in Palestine, with the explanation that the decision on this was already made by Council (which rejected all of our detailed recommendations in June).
– Management has rejected the demand that Council should have at least 50% of its members as elected staff. Again, the explanation is that Council itself has already decided how to implement recommendations for increasing staff representation from the 2023 independent Governance Effectiveness Review (we argue that these recommendations didn’t go far enough, and that even these recommendations were not fully implemented by Council, in that no new process for engaging participation of the full KCL community was established).
– Management won’t commit to pausing the King’s Strategy 2030 in order for full consultation to take place, to rule out compulsory redundancies or to undertake to include improvements to staff terms and conditions (e.g. recommendations from the previous dispute’s working group) within these plans.
Will the branch take industrial action over these demands?
A strong ‘yes’ vote for industrial action would give our branch negotiators significantly more leverage with management to make progress on these demands. There is scope within the demands for us to make tangible gains and reach an agreement that is acceptable to our members and opens up space for much broader future consultation and engagement with management on major institutional change at King’s.
If we achieve a ‘yes’ vote, we would take the question of specific industrial action to a branch general meeting for discussion. Branch democracy has been central to the formulation and development of this dispute over the last year, and the branch will continue to engage directly with members about the negotiations and the form or timing of any industrial action. The branch has had experience and success with industrial action before, even when balloting alongside a national ballot: our 2023 local dispute won important benefits for our members, such as a childcare subsidy and the achievement of the highest London Weighting Allowance among universities in the capital.
There is still much ‘unfinished business’ from the 2023 local dispute – particularly around the implementation of working group recommendations that would benefit the huge proportion of academic staff who are on casualised fixed term contracts (around 42% of faculty staff), or migrant members facing spiralling visa fees with no real assistance from the university. These issues are taken up in our current updated dispute because we are demanding that management consult with UCU to incorporate the implementation of previously agreed working group recommendations into their institution-wide planning (e.g. Strategy 2030). Although the unions-management Recognition Agreement that we won in 2023 entitles us to meaningful consultation on all of these issues, this simply isn’t happening at the moment. This is why we need new leverage to put all of these issues back on the table.
Support your negotiators, and vote ‘YES’
On Wednesday 29 November 2023, hundreds of KCL students and KCL UCU and UNISON members held a walk out and rally to mark the UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This is an annual event with a long history – recognizing the decades of injustices suffered by Palestinians and of their struggle for self-determination. The events were all the more relevant and poignant this year, given Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and increasing violence and repression across the territories of historical Palestine. We are proud that our national union UCU is backing this international day of action and the call by Stop the War to organize workplace actions.
On Budget Day, in Trafalgar Square, 
