Not a lot of people know this, but I’m actually American. Well, strictly I’m dual-nationality Anglo-American, but this does make me a bona fide American citizen with an American passport and the right to vote in the next American election (lucky me). I’m not saying this to prepare the ground for an attempt to run for International Students’ Officer, but to explain why I’m particularly interested in American student politics.

Given this interest, I was more than delighted to help with the organisation of No Sweat’s latest speaker tour, which saw Brie Phillips and Diane Foglizzo (activists with the Living Wage Action Coalition, part of the pro-worker, anti-sweatshop milieu in American student activism that is mainly led by United Students Against Sweatshops) visit seven universities including Sussex, Oxford, Sheffield, Leeds, York, Lancaster and LSE.

The character of the meetings they spoke at varied from place to place; at universities like Oxford and LSE where living wage campaigns already exist, they were able to provide practical support. In other institutions, such as Lancaster, where a reasonably large group of activists is interested in getting a living wage campaign established, Brie and Diane gave advice on how to start them up. Elsewhere, students just wanted to hear about their experiences and learn more about the US living wage and anti-sweatshop movement.

The proliferation of living wage campaigns across US campuses has sent political and organisational reverberations through both the student and labour movements there. It has tied together various strands of student campaigning around broad, internationally-focused “social justice” issue, brought them down to a campus-level and (crucially from my point of view as a class-struggle radical) given them a working-class focus. The creation of a layer of dynamic and innovative campaigners with such a class focus and an understanding of the centrality of workers’ self-organisation and struggle has also provided a stagnating US labour movement with a new generation of talented organisers and activists.

Along with their obvious effectiveness in helping workers organise to fight for wages and rights, these two key successes of living wage campaigning must make them a central tool in the arsenal of anyone in the student movement interested in developing radical, worker-focused activism in this country. In this respect, No Sweat’s role in facilitating links and exchanges with campaigners in the US has been invaluable.

Living wage campaigns already exist on three campuses in the UK – at the LSE, at Oxford, and at Queen Mary’s, where campaigners recently secured a wage-raise for contracted-out cleaning staff. Expanding such campaigns and rolling them out across other campuses can play an essential role in developing student activism in this country. Like so much anti-exploitation, pro-workers’ rights campaigning, living wage activism has immense potential to unite students currently active on a huge range of issues, from refugee solidarity to women’s rights to environmentalism. If NUS CMs take up such campaigns and give a lead on them, they will be able to reinvigorate their own structures by bringing activists who may not otherwise have had official political involvement with their SU into contact with its structures for the first time.

If any of this is making sense to you, check out No Sweat (www.nosweat.org.uk) and its student wing Students Against Sweatshops (www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org.uk) and see how you can get involved. Briefings on how to set up and run living wage campaigns (written by activists at Queen Mary’s and built on by Brie and Diane during their time here) are available on both sites.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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