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Lecturers, support staff, security, cleaners and caterers will return to the picket lines at university and college campuses across Britain today over "peanuts" pay.
The walkout is the third one-day strike in as many months for the University and College Union (UCU), with members of Unison, Unite and Scottish teaching union EIS set to join them over university bosses' insistence on another year of real-terms pay cuts.
Vice-chancellors have drawn a line under a pay rise of 1 per cent for 2014 - barely half the current rate of inflation - while the unions say rising prices have eaten away 13 per cent of the value of their paycheques since 2009.
Meanwhile the average vice-chancellor's salary now sits at around £242,000 a year - 18 times what their lowest-paid employees earn.
The highest-paid take home more than half a million in pay and bonuses.
Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said his members had "every right to be angry."
He stormed: "Wealthy universities can afford to give the highest-salaried staff a generous pay rise, while the lowest paid are being forced to accept peanuts."
Meanwhile UCU seized on new figures from Universities New Zealand that showed Britain's lecturers were paid 45 per cent less than their Canadian counterparts, 34 per cent less than in the United States and 16 per cent less than in Australia.
UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said there was no reason why her members should be paid less than in comparable countries.
"If we don't start properly rewarding staff in this country then international academics will understandably look elsewhere and our own staff may consider their options abroad," she said.
The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) also planned picket lines across Edinburgh College's campuses as well as the university strike.
The college walkout follows anger at bosses demanding 35 hours at the chalkboard each week in return for a 3 per cent rise.
EIS branch secretary Penny Gower said the strings attached would still leave the college's workforce among the lowest paid in the sector, while burdening them with dozens of unpaid hours in paperwork.
