Student Labor Week of Action Hits the Streets
Editor's note: The Student Labor Action Project and Jobs with Justice's week "Resistance and Recovery" burst with 250 events in early April. As the corporate attack on workers intensifies with the economic crisis, JwJ activists and college students took the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination as occasion to push back.
Putting some weight behind the 1.5 million signatures they’ve collected in support of the Employee Free Choice Act, JwJ chapters and students rallied all over the country. Students and community groups at University of Central Florida confronted corporate heads outside an anti-EFCA seminar hosted by the university and an anti-union law firm.
Rallies at Rite Aid pharmacy locations around the country supported employees in California fighting for a first contract. In Massachusetts, hundreds picketed outside Home Depot, a major anti-EFCA player.
For the tenth straight year, student-labor activists joined forces on different campuses. Student groups lobbied in Washington, D.C., for a higher education funding bill called the DREAM Act, while others pressured school administrators to support EFCA. They also intensified a years-long fight for the Designated Suppliers Program, which would ensure that schools uphold “sweat free" policies when buying university apparel.
REPORTS FROM THE STREETS
—Matt Abbott, USAS Midwest Regional Coordinator
Student activists stepped up pressure on Russell Athletic, an apparel supplier that closed its Jerzees de Honduras plant, where 1,800 workers had recently unionized. To date, Russell has been kicked off 26 college campuses, including the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard. The story has been picked up by the New York Times, Forbes Magazine, and The Rachel Maddow Show. USAS is organizing another U.S. college speaking tour with workers from the factory that will be making stops on the west coast and Midwest starting in mid-April.
Students from the University of Maryland’s Feminism Without Borders (FWB, a USAS affiliate) and the Student Power Party came together to deliver a public records request for communications between the university and Russell Athletic. Students marched to the Main Administration Building with large signs and long streamers representing the schools that have already cut Russell. According to FWB member Mary Yanik, “we were chanting, which apparently severely alarmed our administration because they put the entire Administration Building on lock-down because of our demonstration. We also intended to deliver a Public Information Request for our director of licensing, but were unable to get into the building because all doors were locked down. The police also showed up, claiming we were not allowed to demonstrate in this area.”
At the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee campus, students from the Sweat-Free UWM coalition won their campaign, getting university administration to join the Designated Suppliers Program. On Thursday, a massive rally originally themed “Funk the Chancellor,” involving a funk band and a series of speakers, was turned into a “Funk Yes” celebration when the UWM administration finally conceded to students’ demands. "What was going to be a last-straw rally to pressure the administration to sign on to the anti-sweatshop policy is going to be bit of a victory rally because they are signing it!” exclaimed Dana Shultz, a Sweat-Free UWM student organizer. UWM is the 46th university to sign the DSP.
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Members of University of Houston Students Against Sweatshops spoke out at an environmental event on campus last week, urging their chancellor to consider the need for sustainability in workers’ human rights in addition to campus recycling initiatives. UHSAS also filed a state lawsuit against the administration’s Apparel Task Force earlier this week. Students claim the school misrepresented and defamed them in a report issued by this committee last year. “After asking them a long time ago in writing to retract their lies, they refused, so we decided it was best for them to tell it to the judge,” reported group member Tim O’Brien.
University of Minnesota students greeted their president, Robert Bruininks, with signs, a sewing machine, and an old Russell Athletic sweatshirt during a public appearance on campus. The students thanked the administration for cutting the contract with Russell Athletic over workers’ rights violations in Honduras, but decried the university’s continued dismissal of comprehensive supply-chain reform by ignoring the Designated Suppliers Program. The administration put together an internal working group to assess the DSP, but it’s only met five times in two years. Student organizers presented the president with two large puzzle pieces, reading “U of M” and “DSP”. “See how easily these fit together?” asked Mallory King and Prash Naidu, members of the Morris chapter of the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group (MPIRG, a USAS affiliate).
Students attending the United Students Against Sweatshops Regional Conference joined community members at Penn State University for a large Employee Free Choice Act rally. Students presented their president with a letter, urging him to reverse the school’s stated opposition to EFCA. (The school has dispatched lobbyists to the Capital to oppose the measure). They drove home the importance of EFCA for university employees: “In the past Penn State has jeopardized the right to organize to secretaries, graduate students, and student workers… Penn State has been a leader in research and a leader among the Big Ten. When will we be a leader for workers’ rights?" students asked in their letter.
—Sameerah Ahmad
Organizers in the Purdue Organization for Labor Equality held a call-in to Indiana senators, while others wrote letters supporting EFCA. Since 2000, the student sweat-free campaign at Purdue has gained national attention. An 11-day hunger strike forced the school to sign codes of conduct and take part in the Workers Rights Consortium, an organization that monitors working conditions in apparel factories. In 2006 students locked themselves together in the president’s office, demanding he sign the DSP. The administration threatened to suspend everyone, so students held a press conference and escalated the fight with a 27-day hunger strike. The school president continues to hold out.
Last week, POLE celebrated its victory against Russell Athletic. Purdue administrators have cut their contract with the company, but students continue to work for the reopening of the plant. It would not be realistic for Purdue to keep cutting contracts every time there were violations of the school’s code of conduct—so students are still pushing the more systematic solution, the DSP. Contact purduelabor [at] gmail [dot] com for more info.
—Laura McSpedon, JwJ New York
On Friday, April 3rd in NYC, JwJ and the Student Labor Action Project took action for the Employee Free Choice Act and in support of two groups of workers fighting for a first contract. About 100 activists gathered in the rain to rally with Research Assistants from SUNY Stony Brook University who organized last December with CWA Local 1104. They took to the streets outside the offices of a SUNY Research Foundation board member to demand that the Research Foundation bargain in good faith.
Next, about 20 activists marched into a nearby Rite Aid store to deliver a message of solidarity with warehouse workers in California who organized with the Longshore Workers (ILWU) over a year ago and are still fighting for their first contract. A third of workers who vote to join a union never see a first contract because of employer delays. JwJ and its allies are fighting to reform our weak labor laws by winning the Employee Free Choice Act to address these delays and other injustices.