Tag Archives: Student Labor Activism

Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) Connects College Campuses to Union Movement

1 Feb

AFL-CIO Now Blog:

Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) Connects College Campuses to Union Movement

AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow Jennifer Angarita joins Chris Hicks, Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) coordinator, to discuss the parallels between campus and community organizing.

Founded in 1999 as a joint initiative between Jobs with Justice and the United States Student Association, the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) engages student activists with economic justice campaigns in their communities and campuses.

Across the country, students in local SLAP chapters meet to organize around issues that affect both students and workers. Currently, campuses are working together to campaign against dramatic state budget cuts that threaten the layoffs of thousands of workers and increase fee tuitions, which leave students with astronomical amounts of debt.

As coordinator, Chris Hicks helps student activists build relationships with local unions and community and faith-based groups and Jobs with Justice coalitions. Hicks said:

SLAP supports the growing student movement for economic justice by making links between campus and community organizing, providing skills training to build lasting student organizations, and developing campaigns that win concrete victories for working families while breaking the poverty cycle by fighting for access to higher education and full and fair employment.

Every year from March 28 to April 4, SLAP organizes more than 150 campuses during the National Student Labor Week of Action. Across the country, students hold hundreds of events to celebrate the lives of César Chávez and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and build solidarity between students and workers.

Before joining SLAP, Hicks, a recent college grad from Wichita State University, worked as a union organizer for SEIU. His first memory of the union movement came from his mother’s attempt to organize her workplace. The experience helped to expose Hicks to the collective power of working people.

For Hicks, the student and union movements have always gone hand in hand.

Students graduate [and] want the best workplace conditions possible. The interest of the union movement is the interest of the student movement, and that goes both ways. Students should care [about unions] because as soon as they graduate, the labor movement is where they will be. If they don’t fight as students to protect jobs, to stop corporate greed and to stand with workers, then they will be worse off for it. If they do those things, though, and understand that what directly affects workers, indirectly affects them, they will be much better off.

Learn more about the Student Labor Week of Action at www.studentlabor.org. For individuals or groups interested in getting involved with SLAP, please contact slap@jwj.org.

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USAS Goes to France to Tell Sodexo to Respect Workers

20 Jan

Tell Sodexo that student-worker solidarity is global!

Yesterday, four of us arrived in Paris to confront one of the world’s largest corporations on its home turf. Sodexo, the French corporation that serves food to more U.S. college students than any other company, is just days away from its international shareholders meeting. This is a key moment to show the 21st largest employer in the world that we will not tolerate poverty wages and union-busting any longer.

Click here to e-mail Sodexo executives and tell them to respect the rights of their 380,000 workers around the globe.

Workers are fighting, and it’s time for us to join them in solidarity. As more universities outsource and privatize good jobs, the “Big 3″ – Sodexo, Aramark and Compass – control more than three-quarters of all outsourced college food service. And these corporations squeeze pennies from workers just to make their billion-dollar profits each year. Big 3 workers and their many unions are fighting for justice on campuses around the U.S. and all across the globe. Workers in our campus cafeterias and stadiums are rising up against poverty wages, while Sodexo workers at a mine in the Dominican Republic tried to organize a union just months ago and Sodexo responded with a firing, and even the Sinaltrainal union in Colombia that started the “Stop Killer Coke” campaign recently fought with Sodexo to win fairer labor practices. The corporations are global, the worker exploitation is global, so our solidarity must be global.

Since at least 1999, students have been fighting to kick Sodexo off our campuses. By 2001, students forced 6 universities to kick out Sodexo, and the company finally pulled out of for-profit prisons in the U.S. (they still profit from prisons in many other countries!). For a decade, students from coast to coast have demanded their schools drop Sodexo over worker rights violations, environmental misdeeds and unfair meal plan costs. Now, USAS activists have launched a campaign to kick Sodexo off as many campuses as necessary until the corporation begins paying living wages and respecting workers’ freedom to form unions without intimidation.

Please take a minute to tell Sodexo to respect worker rights.

We want you to follow us on our journey here in France. Here’s a couple ways to get connected:

* On Facebook, “like” the Kick Out Sodexo page:
http://www.facebook.com/KickOutSodexo

* We’ll post updates on the campaign blog:
http://kickoutsodexo.org

* To get campaign updates by e-mail, just send a message to kickoutsodexo@usas.org

In solidarity,

Terasia Bradford, Ohio State University USAS
Vicko Alvarez, USAS National Organizer & University of Chicago USAS alum

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U Washington Pres Demands Answers from Sodexo

10 Jan

In response to increasing pressure from students involved in the University of Washington United Students Against Sweatshops, Interim President Phyllis Wise sent a letter to Sodexo headquarters demanding they account for union-busting and poverty wages paid to their food and cleaning service employees.

“I would be interested in knowing how you have addressed worker complaints and claims filed against you, in particular what steps, if any, you have taken to address problems when identified and what mechanisms you have in place to deal with complaints.  I am also interested in your perspective on the pricing issue that formed the basis of allegations made by the state of New York in its lawsuit filed against your company.”

Wise also raised the possibility of the university cutting the contract.  “Our student group is asking the University of Washington to terminate the contract because of these various concerns… Before considering their request, I told our students I wanted to hear from you.”  Read the entire  letter to Sodexo here.

This is an important development in a national campaign by USAS to target the world’s 23rd largest employer who operates contracts at colleges and universities across the country.  Students at other campuses are now able to use this letter and UW’s questioning of the ethical standards of Sodexo North America to push their own universities to take action.

This is a tactic that works.  When students stood up on campuses to push administrators to use their buying power to force ethical standards on huge corporations significant change occurred in the apparel industry.  In their most recent victory Nike was forced to come to an agreement with the CGT union in Honduras, the first time a major brand took responsibility for the wrongs of their subcontractor.

For more on the tactics and “Kick Out Sodexo!” campaign visit: http://kickoutsodexo.usas.org.

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Brown University committee urges end to investment in union-buster HEI Hotels

20 Dec

Brown University committee urges end to investment in union-buster HEI Hotels

from United Students Against Sweatshops

The Brown University Student Labor Alliance (SLA) made an important step on the path to ending the Ivy League school’s investments in HEI Hotels and Resorts of the company’s pattern of union busting.

Luiz Valente, Chair of Brown’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility and Investment Policy (ACCRIP), wrote the following in a message to SLA:

ACCRIP concluded … a persistent pattern of allegations involving the company’s treatment of workers and interference with their efforts to unionize, combined with repeated settlements, as described above, raised serious questions whether Brown’s continued association with HEI would be consistent with the ethical principles governing the university’s investments.

Workers at HEI’s hotels have been organizing with the union UNITE HERE to win fairer working conditions.  In fact, workers have decided to put four of these hotels under boycott: Embassy Suites Irvine, Hilton Long Beach, Sheraton Crystal City and Le Meridian San Francisco.

Looking forward to 2011, the decision by ACCRIP will create more and more pressure on universities around the country to divest from HEI.

You can read SLA’s press release on the HEI Workers Rising campaign site.

 

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WI Students and AFSCME Members Fighting for Human Rights

10 Dec

Great letter to the editor in the University of Wisconsin’s student paper, The Badger Herald, about the Student Labor Action Coalition and AFSCME Local 171 standing together in protest of the privatization of food services at a new facility on campus:

Wisconsin Idea corrupted by WID privatization move

By Letters to the Editor
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 5:00 p.m.
Updated Wednesday, December 8, 2010 11:17:37 p.m.

When students and workers protested the opening of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery last week, they did so after a semester-long campaign and as part of a carefully planned escalation strategy.

The issue at hand is the privatization of food service at the WID. As such, the employees of these restaurants are not guaranteed the same benefits or wages as every other campus employee.

The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Local 171 represents over 1,600 blue-collar workers on campus and has fought to guarantee them a living wage, affordable health care and fair representation. In contrast, Food Fight, the private company contracted to run the WID restaurants, pays their employees barely above minimum wage and offers an unaffordable health care plan. Working families cannot support themselves on $8.50/hour.

The exploitation of workers on campus is absolutely unacceptable. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation defends this privatization of food service through a plethora of legal technicalities and in doing so merely proves that they are willing to exploit Madison workers in an effort to turn a greater profit.

The WID validates these actions through the facts that it is part of a “public-private partnership” and that 70 percent of the building is controlled by private interests. The logic that the WID can gerrymander the building into areas where they can disregard the ethics and governing principles of the University of Wisconsin is extremely questionable and becomes even more debatable when the unionized janitorial staff services 100 percent of the building.

The Student Labor Action Coalition and AFSCME understand that these arguments might hold up in court; our outrage is not in regards to legality, but rather, to basic human rights.

SLAC and AFSCME have been running the campaign to stop the privatization of campus jobs for the past four months and are well aware of the legal arguments, despite The Badger Herald’s assertions.

SLAC knows this campaign will not be easily won, but also knows that this fight is critical because it is emblematic of the problems of the public-private partnership model which Chancellor Biddy Martin touts in her mysterious Badger Partnership.

The fact that the WARF is able to blatantly ignore the ethical standards of the university, from which it receives the totality of its funding, demonstrates that the privatization of the UW will result in a destruction of the university’s mission and values.

The Badger Herald argues that the restaurants should be privately run because “Union food sucks.” As logically sound as this argument may appear, the food quality is not dependent on the treatment of the worker who makes it. The WID could easily allow Food Fight to make the food while also requiring that it employ public workers. It could just as easily allow the Wisconsin Union to manage the restaurants while requiring a new menu.

AFSCME and SLAC demand that the WID hires public, unionized employees, because if we allow the WID to trample on workers’ rights, we are sanctioning the corruption of the Wisconsin Idea and the distortion of social justice on this campus.

Jonah Zinn (jzinn@wisc.edu) and Xander Gieryn (gieryn@wisc.edu) are members of the Student Labor Action Coalition.

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