Our campaign at Royal Holloway began as an awareness-raising campaign about rights at work.
We put out posters and leaflets around campus which focused on basic rights around pay, terms and conditions, health and safety, and made the basic case for trade unionism.
We held “know your rights” meetings, which we targeted both at university staff and campus students. We established a relationship with the existing GMB branch on campus and found out shift-change times for cleaners, porters and grounds staff so we were able to leaflet them.
We held a meeting for student workers employed by the Students’ Union in November 2011 aimed at discussing what people’s issues were. About 40 people came, and there was a lot of really good discussion as well as a lot of enthusiasm to start campaigning around the issues facing working students.
Workers themselves ran the meeting, and decided to organise an informal reps’ structure with elected reps for each section of the workforce (bar staff, catering, tech, etc.). The idea was that those reps would be points-of-contact for people to go to with concerns or issues at work, but also make the case for trade unionism and organisation amongst the wider student workforce.
The meeting also produced a list of demands based on what people felt the key issues were. The three focuses agreed upon were breaks, pay and representation.
The demand around breaks was simply for people to be able to take the breaks they were legally entitled to, which is an endemic problem in a lot of service and retail sector workplaces. The pay demand started off as a demand for a small increase but as the campaign has become more ambitious it’s shifted to demanding the London Living Wage for student workers. The demand for better representation started off by calling for an improved staff forum, but that’s since shifted onto demanding that the SU management recognises the GMB and begins to bargain collectively with the workforce.
The campaign produced an industrial bulletin called Student Worker which brought all our demands and ideas together. People found that hugely useful, because it was a concrete tool to approach your workmates with and start a discussion. As well as people leafleting their workmates, activists also leafleted workers on the busy SU nights on Wednesdays and Fridays.
The campaign has already won some real concessions. People are taking their breaks now, which is a big material improvement in people’s lives at work which wouldn’t have happened without our campaign. There’s also been a small degree of levelling-up of pay between different grades of workers at the SU, and we’re now beginning to lobby the university to fund a pay increase for SU staff to bring them all up to the London Living Wage. We’re also making progress on the issue of recognition and are attempting to go through processes necessary to win formal recognition.
We had to take a decision early on about how much to foreground the issue of joining the GMB. We decided that we wanted the focus of the campaign to be organising, rather than recruitment, so we decided not to make signing a membership form the first thing we asked people to do. A lot of the workers didn’t know what a trade union was, and many of those that did, didn’t feel it had any relevance to their lives. We had to build up basic level of consciousness and confidence around collective organisation before we could push the issue of trade union membership.
That’s not to say we avoided talking about it; we always had membership forms available at every meeting, but we wanted to run a campaign that was about helping workers self-organise to win change at work, rather than a campaign that was simply about recruiting people to the GMB. Around 25 workers have joined the union, which is a good start.
Our model has been very “industrial” in the sense of being fundamentally based on a group of workers in a given workplace — the Royal Holloway SU — self-organising around concrete, material issues. We don’t want to set up a servicing hub for student workers or co-opt a couple of activists to just do casework. Getting people to think of themselves as workers, and making the basic case for fighting trade unionism, has been a key part of what we’ve been doing since the beginning. We’ve tried to go beyond the idea of pushing trade union membership as “protection” or as an insurance policy and towards building a conception of collective organisation that sees a union as a tool you can use to fight your boss and win change at work.
One of the wider reasons we wanted to do this was to challenge some of university management’s discourse about work and “employability”. University bosses and the government see education as training for the workplace. There’s a lot of pressure on students to see their time at university as being about them making themselves a more attractive commodity for their future employers.
Big corporations come onto campus to push their graduate schemes and talk about the wonderful jobs we can get if we do well at university, but the reality is that most of us won’t have access to those “good” jobs — we’ll be getting low-paid, semi-precarious jobs in the service, retail and hospitality sector. As a socialist, I want people to be leaving university with an understanding of work that’s based on class and class struggle. Helping people develop a class consciousness and see themselves as workers while they’re still on campus is an important part of that.
The campaign has also been about connecting students to the existing labour movement. At one of the campaign’s meetings, we also discussed the public sector pensions dispute and how student workers could support the strikes. I wanted to build up an idea of the campus as a workplace, and show how nothing happened on campus, or in wider society, without someone’s labour power making it happen, and show working students how they were a part of that.
Ultimately I’d like to see this model of student worker organising rolled out on every campus. I’ll be Vice President of the University of London Union next year, so I can have a direct relationship with 22 SUs in London. I want to link up with people on those campuses who are interested this work and see if we can push it across London.
What we’ve done at Royal Holloway has shown that the model can work. It’s powerful positive propaganda against those people in the labour movement who say you can’t organise transient workers in semi-precarious, low-paid jobs.
