What is USAS?
United Students Against Sweatshops is the nation's largest youth-led, direct action campaign organization, running local and national campaigns in coordination with labor unions on our campuses, in our communities, and around the world. Since 1997, we have trained tens of thousands of student activists to become skilled organizers and campaigners in the labor movement.
Our mission is to fight for international working class power through the strengthening of union power in the United States and to advance the rights of the working class on our campuses and in our communities. We strive to achieve this through:
1. Building a nationally coordinated movement of students who are trained to be skilled labor organizers.
2. Campaigning for strategic demands that challenge our universities’ exploitative practices and advance the interests of students and workers.
3. Connecting labor struggles to all other struggles for liberation.
We are the student arm of the labor movement, with USAS locals organizing on college campuses across the country.
Organizing Education
USAS works to build mass student consciousness around the importance of strong unions, the role of our universities in the global supply chain, and the immense power that students and workers hold when we organize together.Â
USAS members receive support and resources from our national network of members and allies. Through our training curriculum and hands-on campaigning experience, we develop students into lifelong organizers and labor movement leaders. 1 in 3 USAS alumni go on to work full-time for unions and other labor organizations.
We offer an extensive catalogue of campus organizing workshops, covering skills like strategic campaign escalation, outreach, direct action planning, organizing conversations, meeting facilitation, fundraising, media strategy, and more. USASers attend trainings and strategize their campaigns across campuses at our national conventions, regional bootcamps, and other gatherings throughout the year.
Strategic Campaigns
We define "sweatshops" broadly, and we use our unique leverage as students to run campaigns addressing the myriad of issues affecting students and workers on campus and beyond.
With our Campus Worker Justice Campaigns, USASers organize alongside campus workers fighting for union recognition, fair wages, and safe working conditions.
Our Student Worker Organizing Campaigns build collective power within our own workplaces as student workers at universities that profit off of our labor and tuition dollars.
Our International Solidarity Campaigns target our universities' multi-million dollar contracts with major apparel brands until they meet the demands of garment workers producing our collegiate apparel in overseas factories.
We also show up in solidarity with other worker-led movements around the world - whether it's supporting striking workers in our communities, or pressuring US-based corporations to meet the demands of workers abroad.
Collective Liberation
USAS organizing is guided by our core belief in collective liberation - the idea that all struggles against exploitation and oppression are intimately connected. We engage in the fight for collective liberation through the labor movement because the vast majority of people in the world are workers, and any issue that affects working people is a labor issue.
USAS works closely with unions and worker leaders everywhere to build long-lasting multinational solidarity and collective power. In the spirit of collective liberation, we acknowledge that the struggles of workers on our campuses are inseparable from the struggles of workers on the other side of the world, and everywhere in between.
Collective liberation means that our organizing expands beyond the workplace - USASers organize in all movements for justice, fighting against white supremacy, militarism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, climate destruction, and all other systems that harm working class people.