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By Maria Escobar, on March 4th, 2010  Today, March 4th, students and workers wake up to prepare for rallies, walkouts, call in days and many more activities during the National Day to Defend Education and the Jobs with Justice national week of action to save and create jobs .
Students and workers are tired of having the federal and state budgets balanced on their backs and are standing up to these atrocities. Today, we will stand up to demand full funding of higher education, a stop to the corporatization of education, proportionate representation on university decision -making bodies, and good union jobs in our schools. We will demonstrate that students and workers will not stand on the sidelines as education become a privilege available only to the few and while jobs are lost because of state budget cuts and the inaction in the federal government to pass student aid reform.
We are fighting these cuts now, but we also know that we need to look at the root problem and seek ways to fund the public sector through revenue reform and change
Continue reading Today: Take Action to Defend Education
By rand wilson, on March 4th, 2010 (Originally published on Working In These Times blog at http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5639/troublemakers_go_to_school_in_boston)
 BOSTON—More than 90 union members, students and community activists jammed the SEIU Local 888 union hall here on Saturday for a “Troublemakers School” sponsored by Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
IBEW Local 2222 Business Manager Myles Calvey gave a rousing welcome to kick things off. “We’re not going to get labor’s problems solved in Washington or on Beacon Hill unless we take a page from the civil rights and gay rights movements,” said Calvey, a former New England telecom strike leader. “We’ve got to be a lot more aggressive so that politicians are forced to deal with our issues. We’ve got make our problems, their problems!”
Calvey was followed by a panel of local organizers from the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Angelica Laundry strike, Service Employees’ Local 1199’s Caritas hospital campaign and American Federation of Government Employee’s Transportation Safety Officers organizing drive. Their presentations were followed by a wide-ranging discussion about organizing strategies and reports from other workplace struggles. (To learn more about these campaigns, go to www.ufcwlocal1445.org/Open1445Intro2.htm; http://fairunionelections.org and
Continue reading Troublemakers Go to School in Boston
By rand wilson, on February 18th, 2010 A diverse group of trade unionists, environmentalists, academics and social justice activists gathered at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City for the third annual “Climate of Change” conference.
Conference organizers – The Healthy Planet Mobilization Committee* – kicked it off with a well attended press conference on Friday night featuring dozens of scientists, climate experts and the former Mayor of Salt Lake City. All the speakers took a strong public stand against a resolution adopted by the Utah House of Representatives earlier this month that rejected scientific evidence of global warming, criticized federal efforts to deal with it, and called for the state to abstain from regional collaboration to reduce carbon emissions. The press event was well covered by the local media.
On Saturday morning, former CWA Rep. and well-known author Steve Early and I opened up the conference with a workshop on reviving the labor movement and building labor – community coalitions. The roughly sixty participants were drawn from a great mix of local union leaders and staffers, rank-and-file activists, students, faculty members, and longtime Salt Lake City progressives. There was a lively exchange on topics like labor-environmental coalitions, based on the emerging Blue Green
Continue reading Salt Lake’s “Climate of Change” conference infused with spirit of Joe Hill
By Maria Escobar, on November 20th, 2009 From huge victories in the anti-sweatshop movement to the continued struggle for funding in public education, students and workers are coming together to challenge the existing power structure and fight for a just society.
We first want to congratulate our friends at United Students Against Sweatshops for their victory against Russell Athletics! Russell Athletics which closed their factory in Honduras after workers there tried to for a union nearly one year ago. Students at 96 universities persuaded their schools to suspend or sever ties with Russell Athletic, a major supplier of college logo t-shirts and sweatshirts. This week, Russell announced that they plan to re-open the factory and re-hire all 1200 workers. More details about the campaign here.
 In California, the struggle continues. Across California students and workers have come together to fight against fee increases and the privatization of education. Thousands of students and workers met at the UCLA campus to demand the Regents from the UC system to stop the proposed increases and support funding of public higher education. Several buildings were occupied by students while others marched around the area where
Continue reading Big Week for the Student-Labor Movement
By jwjnational, on October 14th, 2009 Cross-posted from DC JwJ
On October 5th, more than 200 DC high school students wearing all black walked out of classes on to protest the layoff of 388 school employees. Chanting “No counselors, no college!” students met at McKinley Technology High School and marched towards schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s office.
“We are here because our education in on the line,” said one student. “We have no teachers. All our counselors have been laid off. I am a senior, I want to graduate, I want to go to college, I want to have a future, but how can I do that without a school counselor?”
On October 2nd, officers from the Metropolitan Police Department entered classrooms at McKinley at around 2:45pm Friday to escort the teachers out of the classroom.
“I was in class, the police came in, told my teacher to leave the classroom and escorted her to her car. We knew the layoffs were coming but we didn’t know who or when it would happen. It was very distressing,” explained Tamika DeBose, a student at McKinley Tech.
As McKinley students gathered peacefully in the school courtyard on Friday, police attempted to disperse them, pepper-spraying DeBose directly in the face. Another senior, Teyvon
Continue reading Students March, Sit-In for Fired Workers
By Maria Escobar, on October 14th, 2009 In this Update… A Fall Semester Full of Action! News from the Field: SLAP at University of Central Florida; SLAP at Temple University; Boston SLAP; UC Walkouts. Tell Aramark and Sodexo to help stop the “harvest of shame”! Report back from National Student Labor Week of Action. JwJ Economic Recovery week of action and Chicago mobilization. USSA. Fight for Health Care Reform on October 20th! Union Plus Scholarship & Contest
A Fall Semester Full of Action!
During these hard economic times, it imperative that we as students continue working and fighting in our universities for workers’ rights and educational access for all.
With ongoing budget cuts, we have seen students coming together with local labor unions in the fight against the corporatization of our universities and the right to an education for all. Here at the national level we are excited to see all the amazing work students are doing fighting budget cuts such as the student, faculty and staff walkouts in the University of California system and the many other actions across the country.
We hope that the semester continues bringing students and workers together in the fight for justice
Continue reading SLACtivist News: A Fall Semester Full of Action!
By Anannya Bhattacharjee, on October 7th, 2009 Delhi, India— On October 7th, the ITUC-declared World Day of Decent Work, Asian workers’ organizations and representatives along with allies in the US, UK and throughout Europe are coming together to demand a Minimum Living Wage called the Asia Floor Wage.
As the protestors at G-20 recently urged the global platform of governments to realize the fallacy of the neoliberal “free trade” model of development, labor activists in Asia, US, UK and Europe have joined hands to pro-actively propose a new model for growth.
The Asia Floor Wage (AFW) Campaign is based on the premise that we need a new framework for the growth of the global economy; one that is based on labor rights and prioritizes the demand for a living wage.
Garment worker Mirza takes a nap, while her eldest son gives lessons to his younger siblings. He is a school-drop out himself and an unemployed leather worker. Delhi, India, September 2009. cc Ankur Ahuja/CleanClothesCampaign
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Continue reading Activists in 15 Countries Launch Historic Global Collective Bargaining Campaign
By Carlos Jimenez, on October 2nd, 2009 The G-20 meeting is over, the military got to showcase its new toys, and the city of Pittsburgh can once again enjoy its civil liberties after having surrendered them to “the guest with an iron fist.” (for more on how local folks saw the G-20, check out these cartoons in the local paper)
To say that the things that happened in Pittsburgh were, as President Obama said in the lead up to the G-20, “protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism” and that those protests were “not really going to make much of a difference” would be missing the real story about what took place in Pittsburgh and where “the movement” is going.
The G-20 Brought People Together – Connecting Pittsburgh to the World
 Jobs with Justice worked with local and national groups to plan three events as part of activities inserting “People’s Voices” into the discussion during the G-20. Our coalition’s work focused on ensuring that there were spaces for movement convergence that allowed local, national, and
Continue reading Reflections From the G-20. What Happened? Where Are We Going?
By Maria Escobar, on September 1st, 2009 As a recent graduate of Florida State University and current National Coordinator for the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), I am one of the few young workers among my friends and family who is a member of a labor union. This means that unlike many of my peers I have a healthcare plan, a retirement savings account, and a say in my working conditions and wages.
Sadly, this is not the case for the majority of young workers in the U.S. As shown in the report released today by the AFL-CIO & Working America, more than half of young workers under age 35 earn less than $30,000 per year. Thirty-one percent of young workers report that they have no health insurance and only forty-seven percent have retirement plans at work.
Even though many young workers have a college degree, they still aren’t able to pay their bills and become financially independent. Twenty-four percent say they do not make enough to pay their monthly bills. More than one in three workers under age 35 live at home with their parents.
These startling statistics clearly show that young workers must become a crucial part of the labor movement.
Unionization has been shown to be
Continue reading Young People & the Labor Movement Need Each Other
By Carlos Jimenez, on September 1st, 2009 Carlos Jimenez is the Young Worker Project Coordinator for Jobs with Justice.
Over the last decade, the Bush administration pushed the agendas of the corporate and financial sectors so successfully that they are now deemed “too big to fail.” This trend recently brought our economy to the edge of a cliff until the public bailed out these institutions with our tax dollars. Now the financial “experts” say the economy is recovering, but things down here still look pretty bad to me. The Bush years had a terrible impact on working people – especially young workers.
Now here we are in the Obama era, and the many young people who made it possible continue to face an uphill battle on many issues central to their daily lives like wages and health care.
A new report by the AFL-CIO and Working America highlights a power base noticeably absent in national discussions about the economy in spite of their major contributions to the last election – young workers. Here are just some of the findings:
More than half of young workers earn less than $30,000 dollars! Seven out of ten do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses. More than
Continue reading Young People are Key to Rebuilding Worker Power
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