University employees have threatened to strike over job cuts.

University staff have issued a strike threat after their employer announced almost 100 job cuts.

Coventry University plans to cut the equivalent of 92 posts, saying it has to “adapt to the new financial reality” created by Brexit, a freeze on tuition fees and new rules on international students.

It said it would transfer a number of employees within its group to another company, meaning they would have to leave the Teacher Pension Scheme (TPS).

The University and College Union (UCU) says it believes more than 100 staff are at risk of losing their jobs, with another 200 facing having their contracts transferred.

UCU general secretary Joe Grady said the university had “betted big on increasing international student numbers” and staff “must pay the price for their failures”.

He also said that the effort to lock out workers from TPS was “straight out of the Scrooge playbook.”

“Universities are being allowed to bypass industry standard schemes through the back door, causing irreparable damage to the sector,” he said.

The university said the entire higher education sector is facing similar issues and while student numbers have increased, it has to rebalance the student-staff ratio.

It said the proposed loss of the equivalent of 92 full-time posts is equivalent to less than 9% of its academic workforce across the three colleges within the university.

It also said that TPS employees are entitled to have 28.68% of their salary paid into pensions by the university which was “grossly ineffective”.

The union said it has received correspondence from the university management suggesting that 25 academics will go to the School of Economics, Finance and Accounting, another 40 to the College of Arts, 25 to Engineering and another 28 to the merger of two other departments.

It said it believed staff could be forced to leave by March next year.

The university said it would not comment on UCU’s membership numbers.