UK students

Student activism in the UK and the NUS. See also UCU.

Student report

Student report from AWL National Committee to AWL conference 29-30 April 2006. Referred by conference, without debate, to incoming National Committee. It remains the case that, as recent AWL conference have noted, universities and colleges are by far the largest concentrations of young people in Britain. Since youth recruitment is vital for revolutionaries, work in colleges and in the student movement is therefore a priority. Since the early 1980s the AWL and its predecessor organisations have born this out in practice by exercising significant influence in and recruiting significant numbers...

First victory in London

Sweat-free campus campaigners at Queen Mary College in east London have won a great victory. The college council has committed itself to making Queen Mary the first “living wage campus” in the UK. This means no one will be paid less than a living wage (currently set at £6.70 an hour), or receive fewer than 28 days’ holiday and 10 days’ sick pay.

US Living Wage activists visit UK

Brie and Diane from the Living Wage Action Coalition are visiting the UK at the end of May and start of June. They will be speaking at various events including the student activist school at Sussex University on Saturday 27 May. Diane was a student activist at Georgetown University, and was an organiser and hunger-striker during the Georgetown Living Wage campaign. Brie was active in organising around farmworker rights with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Student/Farmworker Alliance through the victorious Taco Bell Boycott. She was the US national co-ordinator for the Student/...

USAS in conference

By Laura Schwartz Recently I attended the United Students Against Sweatshops conference in San Francisco. It lived up to everything I had heard about the energy and increasing power of the US anti-sweatshop student movement. 450 delegates were united in their commitment to 'solidarity not charity'. Support for the international workers' movement was firmly at the centre of all USAS discussions; they understood that workers and students would both benefit from united action.

A new generation

A series of US student initiatives that link worker struggles to student solidarity now form the biggest protest coalition on US campuses since the Vietnam war. As Dan Katz argues, this practical, effective movement should inspire UK students and show a way forward to home-grown initiatives like Students Against Sweatshops and People and Planet. Beginning with the anti-sweatshop struggles of the 1990s which were focussed on the garment-making transnationals, the activists of the US student movement have extended their campaigning. Activists have worked with the unions during “Union Summer”...

NUS leaders attack lecturers’ campaign

By Daniel Randall, NATIONAL UNION OF STUDENTS (NUS) executive (personal capacity) In a recent press release, NUS has “condemned” the decision by the lecturers’ union AUT to refuse to set exams (as part of their pay dispute). The student organisation has vowed to “up the pressure” to “demand” that AUT back down. Leading NUS officers such as National President Kat Fletcher have said that they believe the “immediate priority” is to demand that the AUT sets exams. A letter signed by sabbatical officers from 20 of NUS’s member unions recently appeared in the Independent. Admirably, pro-strike...

Sign this petition!

ENS is calling for signatories to the following statement. You can add your name by emailing volsunga@gmail.com Whilst it is unfortunate if students’ degrees are disrupted, we cannot allow university bosses to divide us by playing the interests of students off against the interests of workers on campus. A quality Higher Education sector staffed by well-motivated and well-paid workers is in all our interests. That means we have to support every struggle towards it, even if that means facing some disruption. NUS’s demands on the AUT to call off aspects of their assessment boycott will have the...

French students and workers revolt against neoliberalism

“The student movement did not start with a single blow. At first it was just the students of Rennes who dared to bet that their strike would snowball, and who shut down their university, on their own for a week. “It will be the same among the workers...” So resolved the 300 university and high-school student delegates who met in Lille on 1-2 April to plan the way forward for the struggle in France. The movement started two months ago, with a small minority of students who ventured to take action against a government measure cutting job security — at first sight just another of dozens of...

The shallow “democracy” of the free market

Ewa Groszewska writes from Poland. Ewa is a member of New Left “Free Belarus!” was chanted by students in Wroclaw recently. “There is no freedom or democracy there, the authorities deal with the opposition by using force,” they argued. At the same time French students of the Sorbonne University were being pacified by the police. A democratic country? And Polish students didn’t even think they could protest against the Labour Code... Such a lack of awareness is due to the fact that people in Poland believe that “flexibility” gives them a chance to find a job. Students in Poland are so soaked...

ENS makes gains despite right-wing conference

By Daniel Randall, NUS NEC The Annual Conference of the National Union of Students began on the same day as two of the most important pieces of industrial action in recent history in Britain and France. Unfortunate coincidence it may have been, but it did serve to nicely highlight how much NUS needs to change. What was NUS doing while the UK local government pension strike and the French struggle against cuts in job security were taking place? It was voting to charge its members £10 for a discount card and, worse, to overturn its committment to universal free education. Conference’s...

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