USAS Campaigns

As the student arm of the labor movement, we are constantly organizing around demands that improve workers' material conditions and build lasting student and worker power on campus and beyond. Our campaigns are expansive because we recognize that any issue affecting students and workers is a labor issue, but most USAS campaigns fall into one of our three core campaign types: International Solidarity, Campus Worker Justice, and Student Worker Organizing.

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGNS

 

Universities hold licensing and sponsorship contracts, some worth tens of millions of dollars, with major apparel brands to produce school merchandise and athletic uniforms. As students who pay tuition to keep the university afloat, we have the power to demand that our schools do not hold contracts with corporations who use exploitative practices to maximize their profits. Since our founding in 1997, USAS has organized in solidarity with garment workers to fight sweatshop conditions such as poverty wages, forced overtime, sexual harassment, union busting, and health and safety violations.

Through our direct relationships and coordination with garment worker unions around the world, we have won landmark campaigns against brands like Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour, to name a few. By targeting our universities' contracts with these brands, we add an extra layer of pressure to the organizing garment worker unions are already engaged in on the ground. When multiple USAS locals on campuses across the United States coordinate campaigns to target university contracts with the same brand, we are able to successfully force the brand to meet garment workers' demands.

CAMPUS WORKER JUSTICE CAMPAIGNS

 

We define "sweatshops" broadly, as many of the same abuses that corporations inflict on workers in garment factories also impact the workers on our very own campuses. USASers strategically use our leverage as students to escalate the fights of campus workers demanding union recognition, living wages, comprehensive health care, safe working conditions, and job security. Through close coordination with campus worker unions, we force our universities to respect workers' right to organize and bargain fair contracts.

While universities try to pit students and workers against each other to stifle our collective power, we recognize that student and worker issues are one and the same, and we pose a massive threat to university power when we organize together. Our campaign wins speak for themselves - from winning higher wages for campus dining workers, to supporting adjunct faculty unionization efforts, to fighting against the outsourcing of campus jobs, or demanding a higher minimum wage for all workers on campus - union victories on one campus have a domino effect for workers at other schools and in the surrounding community.

 

STUDENT WORKER ORGANIZING CAMPAIGNS

 

As tuition skyrockets and students rack up a mountain of debt, students end up needing to work on campus in order to afford their classes. At the same time, universities attempt to cut labor costs by removing jobs for unionized campus workers and replacing them with student worker positions, which often pay less and have little to no job security. Whether it's underpaying graduate student Teaching Assistants, making undergraduate Resident Assistants to work for no pay at all, or forcing student dining workers to work in crowded kitchens at the height of the pandemic, universities have proven time and again that they will exploit student labor to maximize profits. But USASers - most of whom are student workers ourselves - have had enough and are fighting back. We organize in our own campus workplaces for higher wages, health and safety protections, and even union recognition - while the current labor law may not allow student workers in all states to unionize, we don't let that stop us from forming powerful organizing committees of student workers who have each others' backs.

 

 

In addition to our core campaigns, USAS locals also support a number of other grassroots movements for economic and social justice. We show up to support striking workers in our off-campus communities and coordinate actions with workers organizing against corporations like Amazon and Starbucks. We also take on campaigns that tackle the multitude of other issues that students and workers face on campus beyond the workplace. USASers have led and supported campaigns to remove confederate iconography from campus, divest university funds from fossil fuels, cut university contracts with weapons manufacturers, demilitarize and defund campus police departments, and improve services to support survivors of sexual assault on campus, just to name a few. Because we see the labor movement as a part of the larger struggle for collective liberation, USASers work in solidarity with other campus and community organizations to fight against all systems of oppression and exploitation.