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Under capitalism, starvation, war, poverty and environmental destruction blight the lives of millions the world over. At the same time the enormous wealth, resources and human talent that exists in the world is squandered. |
Know Your Rights at WorkThomas Penman
With the ending of both the grant and free education by successive Tory and Labour governments more students have had to work to be able to afford to get through their degree. At the same time, though, few students are informed about their rights at work. Having seen students being ripped off by employers in Leicester, Socialist Students members on the student council decided to push for a ‘Know Your Rights at Work’ campaign and we got it. The University of Leicester Student Union ran a ‘Know Your Rights at Work’ campaign with Amicus that made the link between having rights in the workplace and protecting them through membership of a trade union. The event would not have happened at all if Socialist Students members on the Student Union Council hadn’t worked for it. Once we had got the agreement that the campaign could go ahead it was Socialist Student members and local Amicus activists who did the actual work for it. Setting up displays, giving out leaflets and signing up members for Amicus.
It was a weeklong campaign and was mostly informational but the response we got from students was positive, if sometimes a little surprising. Some students didn't know what a trade union was while others thought that only miners and teachers joined them! This shows the need for socialists and trade unionists to actually get out there and explain to young people what a trade union is and why they should join one.
We also got an agreement that the flyer we created, explaining why working students should join a trade union, will be sent to all the freshers starting in September and that Amicus can have a stall at the Freshers’ Fair. Also all part-time student workers in the students union will be given training on what a trade union is and the opportunity to join an appropriate one. It is our hope that trade union membership will become a normal part of working student life.
Socialist Student members plan to follow it up by pushing to deepen the links between the on-campus trade unions and the Students’ Union. Both students and workers face the same problems of cuts and closures and if we are to fight them we must make lasting links between trade unions and students unions on campuses, as only together will we be able to win the fight against the marketisation of education.
Civil Service Graduates Sarah Mayo
Of course many students have to work while they study but what about when you graduate and you look for full-time work? If you manage to finish your degree (despite the fees and lack for a student grant), you’re still burdened by massive student debt. However, many graduates will expect (or at least hope) that it will have been worth it. Your hard-won degree should at least mean more job opportunities than you would have otherwise.
Many graduates will look for jobs in the public sector, and some will work in the civil service.
The last few years have seen students become increasingly politicised at the governments attacks on Higher Education – in particular the introduction of fees, scrapping of the student grant, and the cuts and closures at many universities. While many are angry at their student debt, the problem doesn’t go away in full-time work. Civil service workers are very low paid, and all young civil service workers struggle on the appalling pay without relying on over-time, second jobs, overdrafts and credit cards to pay the rent, food bills, run a car and general living costs. Although having a degree on the one hand is an advantage, the other side is that for graduates student debt is a serious burden on top of all this. Furthermore they are finding that the government’s attacks on higher education are part of a wider agenda of public sector attacks of privatisation and cuts - and the civil service is at the sharp end of these ‘reforms‘.
Young civil service workers – whether they are 16 or 17 and not long out of school, or are ex- factory workers, or recent graduates – all have a common experience in the workplace of increasingly exploitation and job insecurity. Graduates are rightly angry that they were forced to pay for university to be rewarded with low-paid jobs that have limited future career opportunities. Yet generally speaking Blair and Brown’s government are offering all young civil service workers a miserable future. Gordon Brown’s announcement of the loss of 1 in 5 jobs (or 104,000 job cuts) across the civil service, including 1 in 3 jobs in the DWP, shows a complete contempt for this generation. Young civil service workers taken on as casuals or on fixed term contracts are treated as disposable. Even if your job remains, young civil service workers are in for a shock. They face less promotional opportunities, pension cuts, increased workloads and increasing pressure and stress.
However, young workers are increasingly joining the PCS union because of the union's magnificent and determined campaign against the government's attacks. Last November's strike has started to introduce the role of the union to many young workers (and sometimes reintroduced older and more experienced workers to an active union too!) Thousands of young workers joined PCS and a small but growing layer are starting to become active in the workplace. As the struggle against the civil service cuts in particular and the attacks on public sector pensions in general continue, more young workers will get actively involved in the union. Some of these union activists will include graduates, partly because they have been radicalised by their experience of struggle at university or college. The best and most radicalised students that take part in the anti-fees demonstrations and protests draw the lesson of the need to get organised – despite the failure of the NUS to organise a mass campaign to defeat fees etc. When these students go on to work in the civil service, they are entering a workforce that is also increasingly prepared to fight back against the government’s attacks on their jobs, as workers struggles steps up in the public sector and beyond. The conclusion is that students, graduates and workers generally are increasingly entering struggle and our strength lies in finding a common cause and uniting to fight New Labour’s pro-big-business agenda.
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