The passion of students is fueling a new rise in campus activism

By Virgnia Myers Kelly

Students grabbed headlines last spring when they staged a nine-day hunger strike and won a living wage for campus employees at Georgetown University. An 18-day student sit-in at Washington University in St. Louis drew national attention with celebrities and politicos like Danny Glover and John Edwards—and gained $1 million in salaries and benefits for lower-paid employees. A national coalition of student activist groups is joining forces with the AFL-CIO (www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/walmart), snatching their influential market dollars away from the retail giant and joining demonstrations this fall against low wages, abysmal benefits and poor working conditions (see sidebar, next page). At 13 universities, including the University of Michigan, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Duke and NYU, students are pressing Coca-Cola about human rights abuses among workers at its bottling plants in Colombia and India. Other students are pushing hundreds of universities and colleges to affiliate with the Workers Rights Consortium, combating sweatshop labor used in the factories that produce products—especially clothing—emblazoned with school logos.

Closer to home, students regularly march and picket in solidarity with unions fighting for fair faculty wages and health benefits.

Who says student activism is dead?

“My whole purpose in life is to make a positive difference in the world.”

This was the ingenuous reply from Jerome Garrett, a senior at the University at Albany (SUNY), when asked why activism is part of his life. Garrett, an intern at United University Professions/AFT, also is the northeast New York regional director for the youth and college division of the NAACP. “Ever since 9/11, there has been a steady increase of activism on campus,” he says, although he adds this caveat: “People only get involved specifically when it has to do with themselves.” Garrett is working to stem racism, which he believes is on the rise.

But once students get involved in one cause, whatever the reason, they often extend their concern to others. “Student activism is on the rise because of the war,” says Jen Pufky, recent graduate and former director of legislative affairs for the State University of New York Student Assembly. “It’s affecting them directly.” Minimum wage is another popular issue among young people likely to take low-paying jobs while in school. And, Pufky points out, some students get involved not because of the issue but because of hype—the Live Eight music extravaganza, organized during the G-8 Summit to bring attention to African poverty, being one example.

Once students learn the issues and discover their voices, however, they become active in other compelling causes. “They begin to realize that if they organize, they can make change,” says Pufky.

Unions have certainly appreciated the passionate sense of justice students bring to their causes. At the Universityof Michigan’s Lecturers’ Employee Organization/AFT, president Bonnie Halloran vouches for enthusiastic students who not only show up but bang their drums and speak out at rallies. U-Michigan’s Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality (SOLE) even sent students to classrooms to discuss contract issues. “They’re very, very active,” says Halloran, who adds that the administration pays attention when they speak—and has reacted directly to the student newspaper, which reliably covers LEO actions.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, student support for the Teaching Assistants’ Association/AFT (TAA) creates a campus culture of solidarity. Students helped out when teaching assistants went on strike last year, and at various times have picketed, distributed literature, gone door to door, coordinated letters to the editor and offered “class raps” to educate students and faculty. TAA members have also joined students in hunger strikes against tuition hikes, and occupations to protest sweatshop labor. “There’s a long and continuous history of cooperative work between undergraduate and graduate workers at U-W Madison,” says Ben Manski, who recently finished his law degree there. “There’s a very real sense that we’re all in this together.”

Similarly, students involved in the national Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a division of Jobs With Justice, have been instrumental in actions with the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association/AFT (TUGSA) and the Temple Association of University Professionals (TAUP). Besides peopling picket lines and joining protests, they’ve accompanied TUGSA on house visits and, during contract negotiations for TAUP, handed out apples labeled “healthcare” and other issues to administrators.

“The kinds of students we attract want to end sweatshops in Honduras,” says Fabricio Rodriguez, director of the Philadelphia-area SLAP. “But when they get engaged with workers on their campus and start to feel the power to make a difference, it switches the focus to more local issues.” Rodriguez says several hundred students at three or four Philadelphia-area campuses support social justice through SLAP.

“We find the students very much engaged,” says Tom Kriger, assistant to United University Professions president William Scheuerman. Tom Tucker, a UUP member at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), was particularly impressed with students’ involvement in last year’s presidential campaign. Expecting to register 2,000 students to vote, UUP worked with New York Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), Rock the Vote, mtvU and others to register 20,000 students, and plans to start work earlier on the next presidential campaign. “Students in New York are anything but apathetic,” says Kriger.

But is all this activity effective? Pete Sikora thinks so. “They have a giant impact,” says Sikora, college outreach coordinator for the Consumer’s Union. In Michigan, SOLE was actively engaged in protests at area Borders bookstores, where it brought more than 50 students to rallies every Friday; workers there won a contract just after Christmas last year. SOLE also was instrumental in forming a dispute review board at Michigan to review contracts with vendors. One result is the end of a contract with a laundry company whose workers complained of untenable working conditions.

In one of many examples of students working against sweatshops, SUNY-Buffalo students rallied and protested until their administration agreed to join the Workers’ Rights Coalition, a national anti-sweatshop organization. Although Buffalo is also joining the less favored (purportedly less hardline) Fair Labor Association, students are still buoyed by their victory: “Two and a half years ago, UB didn’t want to get involved at all,” said student Dan Cross, in the student newspaper The Spectrum. “We have effected an institutional revolution. With this we’ve shown how we, as students, can make changes in the community.”

On a more local level, Ben Manski, of Wisconsin’s TAA, recognizes undergraduate power right at the bargaining table. “Our ability as graduate students to win concessions from the administration is strengthened when we can bring more forces to the table,” he says. Undergrads are especially influential because they can shut down the campus—and they win public sympathy. All this student activism flies in the face of the college student stereotype. “Either people think they’re beer-drinking, play-station-playing fiends, or that they’re all marching fist-clenched toward some activist goal,” says Sikora. “Both of those stereotypes are not true.”

Besides bringing a youthful exuberance to sometimes exhausting causes, students also bring a legitimacy to issues that might otherwise be minimized by those making  decisions. Witness national membership in SLAP, with its pages and pages of events listed on an active national Web site. SLAP’s Student “Labor Day” has turned into a Week of Action, going from 30 actions five years ago to 300 this year. More than 10,000 students were mobilized during that week in April with direct actions, rallies and educational events.

There’s also United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), which runs three labor-related campaigns: sweat-free, to rid campuses of merchandise produced by sweatshops overseas; campus community solidarity, to support campus workers; and ethical contracting, to address outsourced businesses like fast food outlets. According to Max Toth, an organizer for USAS’s campus community solidarity, students helped kick Taco Bell off 22 campuses when the restaurant denied responsibility for tomato pickers supplying their kitchens. This fall, USAS launches a “road show” to educate students across the nation with information about the Georgetown hunger strike success. Some students are moving beyond U.S. borders; this summer, 16 USAS students traveled to 13 countries to learn more about unions in the garment industry.

“It’s made a huge impact,” says Toth, citing the formation of the first independent garment workers unions in Mexico and El Salvador, as well as the dramatically altered quality of life among the families of campus workers at home in the United States. “[It’s] made a big difference in their lives.”