12:30pm Murraygate, Dundee, Tuesday 6th August Near Tesco’s
The Young Socialists, Young Workers Rights campaign will be protesting and raising the need to join trade unions.
Maddie, Dundee fast food worker, and member of Unite Hospitality, “If you’re sick of your boss, join a trade union and get involved in our day of action. Retail bosses like Asda are hammering workers with attacks like Contract 6, where paid breaks and holidays are cut and workers are threatened with the sack if they don’t sign up. We support the fight of the GMB trade union against Contract 6. Recently we have sign Tesco workers organised in USDAW take strike action, CWU postal workers walk out against management bullying and Unite airport workers strike for decent pay and to defend pensions. The best way to defend your rights and conditions at work is to join and get active in a trade union. We fight for trade union rights for all workers on day one of employment”.
Oisin, Glasgow bar worker, and member of Unite Hospitality, “Young Socialists Young Workers Rights campaign fights for a £10 an hour minimum wage and trade union struggle for a living wage. Recently at festivals like Glasgow TRNSMT we have seen young workers suffering tip theft and working without breaks. Exploitation of young workers is also rife at the Edinburgh Fringe and T in the park. Bar workers suffer bullying, uniform charges and exploitative shift patterns every day of the week. It’s time to stand up and fight back. As well as fighting for rights at work we want to change society and end capitalism. That means workers control in workplaces, socialism, taking over the top 150 major companies, banks and industries into public ownership”.
Wayne, Dundee factory worker and member of the GMB, “We need to fight for the rights of all workers including apprentices who should be paid a living wage with the trade unions fighting for the Construction Training board to implement this.
The SNP government talks about “fair work” but has let workers down including failing to protect skilled work at the Caley Railworks through nationalisation.
Jeremy Corbyn has a lot of pro worker policies such as a £10 minimum wage, one of our tasks is to call on the TUC, the STUC and the Corbyn Labour leadership to launch a mass campaign of rallies advocating socialist policies, mass demonstrations and co-ordinated national strike action to bring down Johnson’s Tories and force a general election.”
For more information, ring or text or text Maddie on +44 7596 456551
Theo Sharieff, Socialist Students national organiser
Theresa May on Thursday admitted that herself and the Tories got it wrong on tuition fees and higher education funding.
The headline proposal contained in the long delayed Auger report is to give students from disadvantaged backgrounds a £3000 a year maintenance grant, admitting that the Tories in 2015 got it wrong. This will come as welcome news to students who have been forced to take out loans and accrue debt just for choosing to pursue studies in higher education. It’s a reflection of the massive pressure the Tories are under, terrified of the huge anger their policies of cuts and austerity measures has created.
Other suggestions in the report are completely woeful. Even the suggestion to cut fees by a small amount to £7,500 is cover for vicious attacks on students and low paid graduates in debt.
The plan suggests extending the period over which former students would repay their loans from 30 to 40 years. Moreover, the report suggests lowering the income threshold for loan repayments to begin, meaning that even lower paid young workers will be forced to give up their wages towards paying off loans and extortionate interest, simply for going to university.
Clearly these changes are intended so that the government has more time to claw back money from the currently huge and growing pile of national student debt. The debt currently stands at £118 billion, and is predicted by the government to reach £450 billion by 2050 without inflation. Three-quarters of students will not pay back their loan in full by the time it is wiped, and the state will be footing the bill.
The Tories are aware that they are presiding over an economic time bomb. Desperately, they are attempting to remedy that by fighting to further shackle former students, as we age into retirement, with a lifetime of debt.
But even the proposal to reduce tuition fees is a poisoned chalice. When the Tory-Lib Dem coalition trebled tuition fees back in 2012, the government cut its funding to universities, meaning universities were forced to rely on student’s tuition fees for funding.
With the report suggesting a decrease of tuition fees to a still ludicrous £7500 a year, and no proposal for the government to plug the funding gap, universities would face a huge cut to funding – resulting in cuts to courses, redundancies, and closures.
Scandalously, bosses of the Russell Group came out in March to rally against reducing tuition fees for this reason, pretending that there would be no alternative. This however isn’t true.A mass struggle of students united with workers to end austerity could provide free, fully funded university education. Jeremy Corbyn raised in the 2017 general election abolishing tuition fees, but Socialist Students says he should go further – to not only scrap tuition fees entirely and to introduce living grants for all students, but also to cancel all the outstanding student debt.
With Theresa May gone, now is the time to launch that fightback. A campaign to fight for free education which mobilised students and workers in demonstrations and strike actions could spell the end of the Tory government which is tearing itself apart with yet another leadership contest – and fight for an anti-austerity Corbyn led government to power on a socialist programme.
Tens of thousands will take to the streets of London on 4 June to protest against the visit of US president Donald Trump. During his state visit he will also attend – at the invitation of doomed prime minister Theresa May – D-Day commemorations in Portsmouth, angering many.
The sacrifice of D-Day soldiers and others in the fight against fascism during World War Two led to the election of a reforming Labour government in 1945, by returning servicemen and women, determined not to see a return to the capitalist crisis and austerity of the 1930s.
To see May and Trump show their respects is the height of hypocrisy after overseeing a decade of austerity that has thrown many veterans further into poverty, with cuts on pensions, benefits, housing and the NHS.
The great-great grandchildren of these veterans, also hit by austerity, are joining the fightback by leading climate strikes. They are helping to build the protests against Trump in Portsmouth alongside local trade unionists. These world leaders, ‘masters of the universe’, are masters of hypocrisy.
Their claims to defend democracy and act for the many as voices for peace and prosperity are shallow lies to hide the reality. Representatives of the super-rich, their policies are for imperialist plunder and profit, if necessary through war and sponsoring dictatorships.
For workers and their families in Portsmouth, including those working in the armed forces and defence industries, their policies of austerity have led to massive cuts in jobs, particularly at Portsmouth BAE dockyards, pay, pensions, benefits, education, the NHS and council services.
Growing poverty, food banks and homelessness is the outcome. For armed forces personnel returning from conflict, cuts to mental health services has left many of them suicidal and living on the streets.
Portsmouth trade unionists, students and socialists have come together to sign a joint letter of protest opposing the visit of Trump saying: “Trump’s system is one of war and militarism, exploitation and misery, racism and misogyny.
“We stand for a system based on solidarity and the belief that together, united as a class, working people can surmount the international problems caused by the elites like Donald Trump – from climate change to capitalism itself.”
This letter has raised the call for an immediate general election to bring down the Tory government which invited Trump: “An immediate general election, putting an anti-austerity Jeremy Corbyn led Labour government committed to socialist policies in power, is the only way to deliver for the many not the few.”
Only on the basis of a socialist world can we hope to see an end to poverty, racism and war, where the world’s resources can be used in a rational way through democratic workers’ control and planning to meet the needs of all and the planet.
NUS conference is meeting this year in the midst of an unprecedented crisis for itself as an organisation.
The NUS is on the brink of bankruptcy. The responsibility for this catastrophic situation clearly lies with years of successive right wing NUS leaderships who have pushed through undemocratic reforms which have concentrated power in the hands of unaccountable and inept leaders. What has made them inept is their rejection of their role in leading student struggle, instead using the NUS as a springboard into political careers in pro-big businesses parties. They have totally failed to fight for students – including when fees were introduced in 1997, and when they were trebled in 2010, and they have failed to mobilise the massive student support for Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto in the streets against a crisis ridden Tory government.
The reform motion submitted by NUS’ so called “Turnaround Board” says that “there have been attempts to fix NUS’ democracy and governance as far back as 2004.”
There certainly have been reforms since then. But they have not been to the benefit of ordinary students, but rather designed to deliberately side-line and alienate students from the structures of the NUS.
Governance reviews pushed through undemocratically by the NUS’ bureaucracy deliberately side lined the active involvement of students in the internal life of the NUS as a campaigning organisation, and converted it into little more than a charity or a think tank, lobbying politicians without the involvement of its rank and file. NUS’ strength is in its million-strong membership, but this has not been mobilised in defence of students’ rights.
This is summed up by the fact that it was an unaccountable board of trustees who presented a report to last year’s April conference, misleading conference and stating that they had ‘no concerns’ about the financial state of the organisation!
In response to the financial crisis, the Turnaround Board produced a ‘White Paper’ of proposals on how to reform the NUS for consultation to produce the reform motion presented to conference.
But how was this so called ‘consultation’ undertaken? The leadership of the NUS allowed Students’ Unions to submit their official responses without any involvement or democratic discussion whatsoever with students themselves – just responses from SU presidents or CEOs! It’s obvious to all that this entire process has been an undemocratic sham from beginning to end.
The results of this sham consultation are laid bare in the reform motion presented to this year’s conference, as well as a new set of Articles and Rules for the NUS.
Given the lateness of the release of this document, it’s impossible to deal with every detail of what is proposed.
But what’s clear is the proposals mean that the last vestiges of control by ordinary students over the NUS’ political direction are to be removed. An annual NUS manifesto is to be set out, not to be determined by a democratic conference, but instead by a new ‘cabinet’, made up of the 7 full time officers, and to be approved by a board of directors. Students will only be involved to be ‘consulted’ on, not through a conference and face to face democratic discussion and debate, but through online ballots!
While conference will be made even shorter, Students Unions’ will be free to select their delegations however they want – without holding campus wide elections if they choose. Additionally, the proposals argue for the abolition of the NEC, a body which potentially could channel the desire of students for mass struggle , the cutting of 13 full time officers positions, and for elections of full time officers to be contested purely on personal ‘merit’, not on political ideas or manifestos.
These final proposals, if successfully pushed through, could potentially finish the process set in motion years ago when the first governance reviews were introduced by Blairite Presidents such as Wes Streeting (now an anti-Corbyn MP) – seeing the further transformation of the NUS away from an organisation which can lead students in struggle, moving towards the status of a think tank.
That’s why Socialist Students rejects all proposals put forward by the current leadership, including the proposals to cut funding to liberation campaigns and to current full time officers.
However, the NUS does find itself in a state of genuine financial crisis. That’s why we call for the opening of the NUS’s books to the democratic oversight of students and elected NUS officials as part of a democratic investigation into the organisation’s finances, and potential financial solutions to the crisis, led by students and democratically elected officials.
What next? A crucial step towards this would be the organisation of general emergency meetings on campuses organised either by Students’ Unions or students and campaigners ourselves dedicated to discussing building a democratic and fighting national students’ union and potential solutions to the NUS’ financial crisis. Out of this could come an extraordinary national conference to discuss the way forward for our movement out of this crisis in the NUS, open to all students, campaigners and activists.
This could come from a successful struggle to fundamentally transform the NUS; to fight for a re-founded NUS as a democratic, accountable and fighting organisation that puts the fight for things like free education and student grants, affordable student housing, the fight against cuts and marketisation and the struggle to kick out the Tories centre stage.
Socialist Students stands for a student movement which links up with workers in the fight for a society based on peoples’ needs, not the profits of big business – a socialist society.
If these reforms do go through however, it is very doubtful that the NUS will be an organisation which can lead on these issues – in which case, the task of building a new national students’ union will be crucial. In a time when the Tory government is wracked by such deep crisis, and with such huge opportunities for students wanting to fight back, it is vital that we have continue the fight to get organised on a local level on our campuses and link up nationally in the fight against austerity. The recent climate strikes, the 2017 general election, and the student support for the UCU strikes last year all demonstrate the huge appetite for this.
We need:
A national students’ union that fights for free education, for students’ rights, and to kick out the Tories
Mass students meetings on every campus and college to discuss the way forward for our movement
Socialist Students 