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Students SLAPping Injustice All Week |
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They could be partying on the Florida beaches.
Instead, thousands of students are spending their spring break taking part in National Student Labor Week of Action (better known as SLAP Week). From March 27–April 4, they will march, rally and protest against “the Corporatization of Education.”
The week of action is organized annually by the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a project of Jobs with Justice—a nationwide network of community-labor coalitions—and the United States Student Association—the largest organization representing students on Capitol Hill.
In Miami, students will ratchet up their campaign for a union for the university’s janitors by presenting to school administrators a national petition supporting the janitors’ struggle. Further north in Orlando, University of Central Florida students are helping fast-food workers at the “World’s Largest McDonald’s” get a decent wage and a union.
In Washington, D.C., AFL-CIO and affiliated union leaders will join with George Washington University students March 30 to shine a spotlight on corporations that are fighting workers’ freedom to form unions, including Verizon Wireless and McDonald’s, and support adjunct professors’ fight for decent pay. At the University of Southern California, students are educating other students about the horrifying conditions in fashion sweatshops around the world.
University of Vermont student activists, faculty, campus workers, elected leaders and members of Vermont’s labor community are working to pressure the university to bargain in good faith with the faculty union and respect the right of clerical staff to organize free from harassment and intimidation. They also want the university to be more responsible in its selection of outside contractors who provide campus services.
SLAP Week began in 2000 and takes place every year around the time of the birthday of César Chávez (March 31), founder of the mostly immigrant Farm Workers, and culminates on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4). King was killed as he helped black Memphis garbage workers form a union.
Through supporting organizing rights on campuses and in communities, increasing awareness of devastating effects of free trade, demanding living wages, immigrant’s rights and an end to sweatshops, students and workers across the country are building a powerful movement in support of economic and social justice.
This year, students and college workers are fighting economic injustices perpetrated by corporations and administrators in high schools and on college campuses.
As the SLAP Week organizing manual puts it:
Nationwide the “corporatization” of higher education is becoming a reality! Each year wealthy corporations reap generous profits from U.S. colleges and universities. Unfortunately, while these corporations make millions, the working class suffers.
The rising cost of college tuition, federal and state financial aid cuts, and harsh anti-immigration policies have made it almost impossible for many students to attend college; adjunct professors’ face increasing pay cuts; the National Labor Relations Board has denied graduate students the right to unionize; university service workers endure unfair wage. And while the salaries of university administrators are on the rise, attacks on workers’ rights, lack of healthcare, unsafe and unsanitary working conditions and glass ceilings have made the campus work place all but “Ivy League.”
Sisters and brothers, it’s time for us to take back our campuses.
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