(An edited version of this article originally appeared in Solidarity, the fortnightly journal of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.)

I talk a lot about why students should unite with workers, primarily those on their campuses such as lecturers, cleaners, librarians or catering staff. But a decade of huge attacks on education funding have meant that more and more students are forced to enter the labour market themselves and working for increasingly long hours for increasingly poorer pay. Government propaganda about how much more university graduates can expect to earn is not much consolation during an eight-hour shift behind a bar or stacking shelves in a supermarket.

The situation is perhaps worst for students in sixth forms and Further Education colleges. The meagre grants given to HE students look luxurious next to the pitiful Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) that FE students receive. This appalling lack of funding combined with the totally reasonable and understandable desire to gain a bit of financial independence from your parents in what may be your last years at home, lead FE students into jobs with appalling conditions and appalling wages.

During the last six months of my A-Levels, I worked as a cleaner in a local comprehensive school. Fortunately for me, my workplace was well organised and I was able to join a trade union – Unison. Consequently, I was also paid reasonably well. But for most of my friends who also worked – and for most FE students in work across the country – the situation is not so rosy. Many of my friends worked as pot-washers in the kitchens of local restaurants, sometimes without official terms of employment in cash-in-hand jobs that paid below the minimum wage. This precarious situation made it almost impossible for them join trade unions for fear of losing their jobs.

The NUS is capable of talking the compassionate talk about student debt and student poverty, but it has done nothing to make sure its members who work know about their rights as workers and know how to fight them. NUS’s relationship with trade unions seems to extend only as far as Kat Fletcher dining with labour movement tops at TUC Congresses.

However, the NUS is not solely to blame in this instance. The trade unions have, for years, ignored the sectors in which many students work. Because of the high-turnover of workers in the retail, bar and fast-food sectors (and because of the intensely anti-union belligerence of many employers in this sector), the unions have been less than enthusiastic to go into these sectors and organise. Where unions are established in such areas, they are frequently totally in thrall to the bosses – such as the shop-workers’ union USDAW, which recently collaborated with Tesco’s multi-millionaire bosses to slash sick pay for Tesco workers.

For these reasons, there is no fighting and campaigning collaboration between the NUS and trade unions at all – until now.

Along with others on the NUS NEC, I am developing a project with trade unionists aimed at organising students in the workplace. This project is aimed not only at ensuring that the NUS takes the lead in fighting for its members’ interests in the workplace as well as on campus, but also at doing what we can to make trade unions take the issue of students working in precarious, unorganised jobs seriously.

Many students work in sectors filled with viciously anti-union employers; McDonald’s, for example, has been known to close branches where workers have tried to organise. It’s not enough, therefore, to simply give sixth-formers working part-time flipping burgers union membership forms and wait for them to sign up. Years of bureaucratic atrophy in both the NUS and the labour movement have taken their toll, and some glossy leaflets or sharp propaganda is not going to dramatically change the situation overnight.

But if this project can go someway to properly restoring a labour movement focus in NUS, go someway to making it take its members’ rights at work seriously, and go someway to forcing the trade unions to reconsider their bureaucratic reluctance to organise in the relevant sectors, then it will have achieved a great deal.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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